So in my last column, I talked about how there are some things about Canada that I instantly fell in love with, and some things that I’m still getting used to.
One thing I’m having a hard time getting used to is classroom discipline – especially talking in class. In all my years spent in elementary, middle and high school in India, there were only a couple of incidents I remember where a student or students chatted in class while the teacher was teaching, and didn’t get punished.
When a teacher caught a student talking, the punishment would range from yelling at the student to shut up and pay attention, quick raps on the palm with a wooden ruler (or as some of you call it here, a scale), to throwing the little bastard out of class.
Whatever the teacher had to say was considered worthy of pin-drop silence. Even the cool kids sat silent for 50 minutes straight, speaking only when spoken to or if they had a question.
Here students seem to be given a lot of liberty in the classrooms. Professors REQUEST that students quiet down rather than being firm and telling them to, well, shut up.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that my teachers were dictators or anything of that sort, but their strict ways definitely taught us a lot of discipline.
Because I was brought up under such a strict classroom environment, where the only sound heard was the teacher talking and the occasional cough of a student, I often get distracted between what the professor is saying and murmurs of the students. Of course, not all classes have this sort of thing going on, but on the rare occasions that it does happen, it’s very noticeable.
I love the freedom a teenager has here in Canada – at home and in classrooms – but it often gets me wondering how someone who is used to such leniency would react to a much stricter classroom.
Who knows? Maybe somewhere in India is a Canadian writing an article about how different our classroom environment is.
