I have started swimming at a public pool near my house. Its a fairly popular pool, where a mix of people come to get exercise, learn swimming, or just to beat the summer heat. There are hourly batches, but since i am the way i am, i have managed to go across all time bands in the morning hours.
The way kids who are learning are treated stands out sorely and i said to myself, this isn't working, its not right. You will imagine that swimming coaches will have better people skills, especially while dealing with kids who will break into their worst crying sounds. I realised we are years away from ways to train the trainers! And in my little hypothesis, i think our rote system of schooling is to blame. The teacher says, do this and you obediently do it. No thinking there. This goes on in most aspects of life too. Parents, elders, swimming coaches in this instance.
In each batch, there will be one kid who is learning how to dive in the water. There will be the coach in water, reassuring the kid to jump and there will be a parent who will be breathing down the kids neck to jump in. There are verbal instructions - keep the head between knees, fling yourself hands stretched out, bend this way, jump that way... The instructions don't stop despite the kid diving flat on the water and hurting his / her stomach.
The rote education system relies on the child capturing / retaining based on repeat. At the pool, i think the coach (and the unnecessary parent), hope the diver will learn thru trial and error. No one is thinking of actually teaching the kid how to dive.
There is an out of the box solution and i will try it this week.
Everybody has a phone with video camera and enough memory space. Record the kid when he / she is jumping and show them what they are doing wrong when going thru video together. Give specific instructions. Compare videos on youtube.
Yes, there will be some privacy issues. Of course, there will be people who will be uncomfortable. However, if a corner is kept for this mobile camera and those who don't want to get shot stay away, i don't think anyone else should have a problem. Alternatively, the pool representative can be trusted to shoot and delete the clips on daily basis.
Learning has to happen outside of conventional means. We are stuck with unimaginative education system, but we don't have to live with it all our lives.
The way kids who are learning are treated stands out sorely and i said to myself, this isn't working, its not right. You will imagine that swimming coaches will have better people skills, especially while dealing with kids who will break into their worst crying sounds. I realised we are years away from ways to train the trainers! And in my little hypothesis, i think our rote system of schooling is to blame. The teacher says, do this and you obediently do it. No thinking there. This goes on in most aspects of life too. Parents, elders, swimming coaches in this instance.
In each batch, there will be one kid who is learning how to dive in the water. There will be the coach in water, reassuring the kid to jump and there will be a parent who will be breathing down the kids neck to jump in. There are verbal instructions - keep the head between knees, fling yourself hands stretched out, bend this way, jump that way... The instructions don't stop despite the kid diving flat on the water and hurting his / her stomach.
The rote education system relies on the child capturing / retaining based on repeat. At the pool, i think the coach (and the unnecessary parent), hope the diver will learn thru trial and error. No one is thinking of actually teaching the kid how to dive.
There is an out of the box solution and i will try it this week.
Everybody has a phone with video camera and enough memory space. Record the kid when he / she is jumping and show them what they are doing wrong when going thru video together. Give specific instructions. Compare videos on youtube.
Yes, there will be some privacy issues. Of course, there will be people who will be uncomfortable. However, if a corner is kept for this mobile camera and those who don't want to get shot stay away, i don't think anyone else should have a problem. Alternatively, the pool representative can be trusted to shoot and delete the clips on daily basis.
Learning has to happen outside of conventional means. We are stuck with unimaginative education system, but we don't have to live with it all our lives.
