Caution: English Triggers Suicide | TruthDive
Caution: English Triggers Suicide
An Engineering fresher committed suicide recently in Chennai, and according to press-reports, this was a consequence of his lack of English communication skills. I was upset for a while, but I could clearly understand what must have gone through his mind. I have taught Technical English to first-year engineering students for over two years now, so I speak from a little experience having met students who have almost been pushed to the same situation.
1. Such suicide is not a sixth-semester or a third-semester phenomenon. We might imagine that students would react when they see bad results, when they see fail grades, and so on. That is just our perspective as teachers. Students on the other hand, and especially teenagers belong to this i-will-think-very-far-ahead group. When I first started teaching, on the second day, a girl trailed me. And before she even started speaking about what her trouble was, she was crying aloud. And I was so shocked and worried and imagining all sorts of things. Picture a very weepy kid on the corridor and a perplexed teacher. Then she says, “ma’am, I can’t understand English. Not just your class, but other subject teachers as well. I can’t take notes, and I can’t follow what is being said in class. I will fail. So, I want to die.” I don’t know whether being hardly half-a-dozen years older than her made me a better counsellor than what a middle-aged teacher must have been. All that I asked her to do was to be calm. I made up stories. I told her that eventually the subject teachers themselves would deteriorate/ slip into Tamil in the classes. I told her how we (as teachers) were trying hard to impress the kids just as they were trying to impress us. I told her that she would soon catch up with the rest of her class. I promised that I would slower my own pace of teaching. I told her to come to me for any help. I told her to read as much as possible in English, starting with whatever caught her fancy. That was one of those good years, when I could manage to give special classes to Tamil-medium and Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. Soon, she picked up and I think she managed to get a ‘C’ grade (70%) on the English paper. A year later, I got to meet her father, and we recollected the tough times, and how she had managed to make it. This is a success story.
Teenage girls have enormous amounts of resilience–the first of which is evident from the fact that she actually spoke about her problem. Second, she knew she was not alone, I had taken pains to point that out to her. Every class has at least half-a-dozen students who come from Tamil-medium backgrounds and also lack fluency in English. What also worked in her favour was the fact that she was somebody who did not reject the system because of the feeling of alienation. Every day, I found her on the first bench. This is not the case with boys who face a similar problem. First they meander away to the last benches, and soon, if it goes against them, they start absenting themselves from classes.
2. Special/ Remedial classes can actually solve a bit of this problem, as I have seen from experience. But it comes with a ‘problem-tag.’ Would you like to be “seen” as someone who needs special classes? Isn’t that experience “humiliating” by itself? Does conscription into this class means being denied entry into cooler groups?
3. This confession might prove to be costly, I might even stand to lose the job. But I am going to put it out into the open, nevertheless. Students are taught English for 60 hours in the first semester, and 45 hours in the second semester. The smallest class I have handled consisted of 37 students in Geo-informatics (and I got lucky because this was a class previously assigned to someone else). The first year I got a class with 84 students. The next year was a tie-up between 80 students (all boys but for 2) Mechanical Engineering and an extremely unruly class of 95 Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). I’ve also done a class of Civil Engineering with about 80 students. It takes ages to even familiarize oneself with the names of the students. The number of hours at our disposal are limited. Afternoon classes (these are often the ones allotted to English teachers) ensure that there is no real teaching or learning. Teachers have to vie with campus-festivals for capturing the students’ attention. There are three assessments within a four month period and paper-correction can be backbreaking. What happens when you think 10 students out of 80 cannot make the cut. Do you fail all of them? In my case, hell no, I don’t. Those who are borderline, those who can get somewhere near the forties are pulled up and made pass. And why do I do this? Because I know that a student who has scored 40% now, is not going to dramatically score 50% or 60% in the next exam merely because he was made fail now. On the contrary, the mere fact that the student has an ‘arrear’ in the English is going to merely depress him no end. If 60 hours of teaching could not help, how would appearing as an arrear student, cramming for two days prior to the arrear exam actually help or advance the student’s English skills?
4. This is not in my hands, I know. But I have had students who get up in class and ask me: ma’am, what does “unable” mean? And then I realize, if a student has managed 12 years of schooling without knowing this word, how much of my daily chatter is he really understanding? What I really wish is that they changed the manner of teaching language in schools, if they ensured that something was really taught. Expecting english teachers at engineering colleges to manufacture glib, communicative and ‘employable’ graduates within a 100hr time-frame (not to mention extremely large classes) is certainly unfair.
posted by Poobathy at 1:18 PM
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