Tutoring the Litte Buds_4

“Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.”

                                                                            ― Douglas Adams

  Alphabets are the 26 rungs of that ladder which is climbed and descended endless times to make a house of words. These houses make cities of sentences, countries of paragraphs and indeed the whole world of prose which symbolizes knowledge.  Teaching the alphabets therefore might appear to be a trivial task, but it is actually the most difficult one.

I realised this today during my yet another session with the little buds. We started teaching the alphabets today with the most obvious alphabet ‘A’. I always thought of it as something so basic that everybody in my view understood what it meant. But my erroneous notion was only highlighted today. As we had planned we made some worksheets which were intended to enable the little wonders to write and pronounce the letter A and teach them some basic words which started with A – more precisely ant, aeroplane and apple. To me and to my classmates, it was the easiest task we had undertaken, but we couldn’t interpret the mysterious smile which our supervisor Ms. Shaila had in the outset, until we actually realised the problem. Some of these little minds had merely any knowledge of writing, especially my students – Reshmi and Sonakshi. I asked both the girls to pronounce the letter out loud which they did, but only after a handsome amount of persuasion. Then was the real challenge, to make them write it! The worksheets had dotted-lines which they just had to trace in order to make a small and capital A (a). However they could not make their hands do that! I felt as if I should get inside their heads and make them do what I wanted! Alas! I couldn’t possibly do that! But then I saw my classmate Shradha, holding her student’s hand to help him write. I was struck by lightning at that moment, how could I possibly miss considering that? I quickly did the same, and things became easier. During this incidence I learned something very important. Sometimes, we become so obsessed with our advanced thinking that the most basic things cease to strike our mind. It’s not that I did not know how that was done – I learned it the same way – but at that moment, my mind had gone far ahead to find something new, leaving the most obvious thing behind. I therefore learned that one must always search for the simplest solutions to problems rather than wasting time in complex ideas.  They learned ‘A’ and I learned ‘a’ lot!