Stress phobia

The students of class XII of CBSE shall write their examination from 01 March and that will be followed by the students of the other examination boards. The students must have worked hard all through the year and many of them are well prepared for the same. But as usual, there seems to be stress in all those families from which any child is appearing in the board examinations. This is quite natural also. This group of the children is the one which has been through the conventional method of assessment and evaluation. They have been through the same exercise right from the beginning of their student life. They have already taken one public examination when they were in class X. From this we can conclude that they are better prepared for facing an external examination. But still they and many of the family members have not been at ease for the time they have been in class XII.

There have been debates and discussions on the topic of the stressful life of the children and the ill effect of the same on the overall development of the children. The psychologists and the educationists have been trying to reduce the stress of examination and some revolutionary steps have been taken in that direction. But the question asked is the same. Has the stress level gone down? When it comes to primary classes it seems to be having an effect but in the senior classes the things have not improved rather the children are finding it more difficult to cope up with the stress to which they are exposed to,all of a sudden. It would be interesting to see the response of the children who will join class XI if they have studied the simple syllabus based, term basis and have not faced traditional annual examination. Because class XI and XII will have the same method as we have been following for years. Now the question is that, should the children not face the examination at all because when you are not exposed to any stress at all then, would not this very little stress also appear to be too much? We can understand it well by the following example. The people who live in the areas where it a very cold weather, get used to that after sometime and if somebody from a place which did not have that severe cold goes there then it becomes difficult for them to face that severe cold. Another example is about the school timings in USA or European countries. The school timings in these countries do not usually change until it is some serious situation or an emergency. The students as well as the adults follow the same even if it is very cold or otherwise. Another example will prove the same. If you do not take a  walk for a few days and then start it all of a sudden, for the first few days the speed as well as the energy level would be a bit low. What I want to mention here is that having no stress is not really good. It has been advocated by many people that stress is not always negative but the same also helps in performing better but this all depends on how do you take stress or in other words, how well prepared we are to face the stress. Stress is there sometimes in the mind also. If we start thinking too much about the consequences then it is going to be negative and if we take it as a catalyst to do better, then it will help us to perform better.

We must ensure that all three domains are properly taken care of in our teaching learning process. The three domains are cognitive, psycho motor and affective. Our system has been focusing more on cognitive and the very important factors like affective and psycho motor were not given that importance as they deserved. Now the things are changing and we hope the next few years will prove to be good for the children as the government has thought of bringing reforms in a manner to give equal importance to the overall development of the children at school level. The parents and the teachers need to change their approach accordingly. Let us prepare our children for all the challenges of  life so that they take success and failure in the right spirit.

The government should also have inclusive approach. That means to talk about the reforms in education without focusing too much on the examination only. As mentioned earlier, if the curriculum transaction is good and effective then the rest of the things will be taken care of automatically. Let us not allow stress to turn into phobia but enable our students to use the same for better achievement.

 In the end, I wish all the students best of everything and may they perform to the best of their ability and not necessarily according to the unrealistic expectations of parents or the teachers.