Learning Made Easy

It has become imperative to draw the attention of parents, guardians and child caregivers to the persistent harmful learning practices that children are subjected to in schools, homes and other learning centres in Nigeria. They are not only stressed with long hours of learning but also abused verbally or physically for poor performance in their academic and non-academic activities.

How are the children expected to perform well in their activities or tasks when they wake up as early as 4 or 5 am daily to prepare for school, spend between 8 to 10 hours daily at school and still have a home lesson teacher waiting to continue when they get home?

Facts File

A review of different educational reports reveals that:

1. Learning shouldn’t be designed to exhaust the young learner.

2. Spending long hours learning does guarantee understanding, good academic outcome or successful learning.

3. Every child has his or her unique learning abilities and the educators and parents should understand the peculiarity of each learner and apply appropriate learning methods.

4. It is unacceptable to verbally or physically abuse a child for poor academic performance without probing further to know the cause and proffer relevant solutions.

5. Parents and educators should be more observant of the child in their care to enable them to know when something isn’t right with that child. That is, handle each child individually even though it is a class.

6. Counselling is one way of helping a child open up to you about his or her academic challenges and not constant flogging or other forms of punishment.

Case in Point

A 10-year-old girl was constantly punished in school for her low academic grades because her teachers were frustrated that all their efforts at getting her grades up weren’t yielding any result.

The young learner suffered both physical and verbal abuse at home and school without any improvement till a new class teacher observed that she was struggling with her vision from the back seat where she sat constantly and also struggled with comprehending easily like others.

To be sure she observed correctly, the teacher invited the girl to the front seat, asked her to read from the board and she managed to read with less difficulty and visible anxiety.

Further examination by a doctor revealed she had an eye and anxiety-related problems which affected her comprehension, confidence and concentration leading to her low grades.

Final Words

There are many children out there with various learning disabilities such as dyslexia, language processing disorder among others, which are not known to many and it is the function of the parents, guardians and educators to discover and help such children.

Learning doesn’t have to wear that child out, please beware!