Treating children the right way

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Lets do a simple exercise.

• Recollect your earliest memories
• Recollect your happiest moment as a child
• Try to find out who or what was responsible for that happiness

This aside, do the following exercise

• Try to recollect your earliest memory of sorrow as a child
• Recollect the person or event or situation that caused this unhappiness

I am sure that you can recollect the person/event/situation that caused sorrow more vividly than the factor responsible for happiness. This is because sorrow is more powerful than happiness.We are born with the ability to be happy, but sorrow is introduced to us by other people.

We remember being punished, but rarely do we remember why we were punished.

What you give to a child should be absolutely devoid of negativity. As adults we often have so much of sorrow, anger, frustration and sarcasm inside us that we accept as a part of who we are. For children, it is a different thing. These emotions are new and hurting and have a deep impact. It forms them as people.

This week at Niveditha Nikethan brought out these thoughts in me when I saw a child being told off by an adult for some messy work. The child shed some tears, then she was laughing some time later. But that scar will last for ever.

• If you happen to work with children please understand their nature.
• Do not try to instill the sense of what you think is right/wrong, good/bad, in a child.
• Present facts to the child and guide him/her.
• Do not force your opinions on him/her.
• If a child is wrong use gentle language to tell them what is wrong with patience and affection. Just because he/she is younger does not mean you can talk to them any way.
• If they repeat serious mistakes be stern and talk to them about it, but don't resort to abuses. Explain patiently.
• Become a child while talking to them, but treat them with respect. Don't baby-talk.
• When children are in a group, treat each one equally.
• You are never more important than the child.
• Put yourself in the place of the child and treat them the way you would like to be treated.

The way you treat a child affects him/her for an entire lifetime. You can break or make a child's life. Feel that sense of responsibility and act accordingly. If you cannot, then don't deal with children.

Career planning

I have failed many times in trying to get something like this moving. Lets see if I can make it work this way. Please help me put together a database of information that I can use to help children who are planning their careers. It can do a world of good to someone. It doesnt matter what career path you have chosen, you may write about some path that you simply know of.
Students in rural areas just jump to the most popular fields and then repent, get disillusioned and waste their lives away in fields that they never wanted to be in. So this information could help them a lot.
You may fill this out and mail it to me at ruling(dot)world(at)gmail(dot)com or simply copy-paste it out in the comment form here.

Name of Career path:
Was the same chosen by you (or are you writing about something that you simply know of):
Description:

• what does the student study ( a short list/description of subjects and the courses that colleges offer for this.)
• how this education equips them to work
• what a real job in this field involves
• what one should already have studied in order to take courses to follow this path. (eg. Biology in +2 is essential for a career in medicine etc.)
• what are the opportunities in this field (if possible supported by statistics from good sources)
• what would the monetary benefits, lifestyle be like etc. (We include this information in order to help students visualize well and not to mislead them. This is only to tell students what they should expect – long hours, night shifts, patience! or hard work!! etc.)
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Colleges that offer this course:
How to apply to them: Entrance examinations, admission procedures, when to apply etc.
Advantages of this career path:
What kind of people it would suit: As in, excellent Math ability, or artistic bend of mind etc (This was just for the sake of an example J )
Any other information that you would like to provide:

Your name:
Occupation:
Organisation(Optional):
Location(Optional):

A long pending update

It has been a long time since I wrote here, not that I forgot. Just that I had more immediate things to take care of. Loads of work has been going on meanwhile and here is a quick update. Thank you "Quite Bored" for bringing me out of my slumber.

It has been 3 months at Niveditha Nikethan and we are loving it. 'We' includes a group of working professionals and 28 lovely girls aged 6 to 16.
We initially started out to teach them a little about computers. But the wide age group and the English skills of the children hampered our progress. Not that they could not go ahead with learning computers without learning English. We could manage teaching them in Tamil, their native tongue. But they wanted to learn English and we wanted to teach them, in order to make it easier for them to work on their own (at a later date) on Windows.

We have installed a used PC there for them to experiment on. They took to it pretty easily. This is only for the older girls. The younger ones are unable to get at the computer because they are 1) scared, 2) unable to make out alphabets in English, 3) they don't have enough time to work at it, after school especially when the older girls are around.

Them being scared has not been an issue so far, we have been able to bring them out of their shells. It just took a little smiling. They love being called out or made to say something to the rest. I imagined they would be too nervous to talk in front of 30 people, but they glow with pride anytime they are asked to do something. There is healthy competition in the air, they vie for our attention.

Here are some pictures. There is a lot more to tell you about, but I know you don't like my looong posts, and I can't effectively summarize what I have to say right now. So I will post that again soon. Please keep watching.

The Whole Group

They love attention, they love fun