Ginormous school bags, chalk boards, pin-drop silence—will these and other school-time classics disappear with the passing years? We investigate
The Ginormous School Bag
Carrying school bags overloaded with books as heavy as rocks has always been a student’s nightmare. Awareness of the orthopaedic and stress-induced ailments caused in kids below the age of ten, by this tremendous burden, led to a High Court verdict that bags should weigh less than 10 per cent of the students’ body weight. Considering that heavy bags won’t be allowed in schools, maybe within a decade or so, bags won’t be allowed in the class altogether. Maybe we’ll see lockers in schools then?
A Change of Board
Blackboards have always been a pivotal ‘tool of learning’, the centre point where all eyes focused on what the teacher was scribbling and copied it before it was erased. With time, blackboards were replaced by green boards, then white ones (and markers replaced chalk). Even these are being partially replaced by gadgets such as projectors. Add to this, the inclusion of tablets and laptops in the classrooms and classroom-writing boards may soon be a thing of the past.
Write to Perfection
Writing is essentially the primary thing we all learn as soon as we are a few years old; aided by the tonnes of homework we’re given at school. It was common for earlier generations to write difficult spellings at least 10 times in their notebooks, so that they could get it right. Even punishments involved writing sentences such as ‘I will not talk in class’, as many as 50 to 100 times! However, as iPads and laptops invade a child’s home and school space, the process of writing is taking a back seat. With the rising popularity of e-learning, online form filling, e-books or video-books, writing is being replaced by typing. Perhaps in the future the basic requirements of literacy—the ability to read, write and speak—will be modified to ‘the ability to read, type and speak’.
Pin-drop Silence
‘I want pin-drop silence’—a statement that was omnipresent in school classrooms until a few years ago, was a symptom of the one-way teaching procedure, where the teacher would talk and students had to listen attentively. However, stark changes in the teaching techniques of late have meant a slow but striking change. More and more schools are adopting techniques where students are constantly engaged in questioning, exploring and experimenting; they are as much a part of the dialogue, as the teachers. Judging by the evolving teaching techniques, the ‘passive classrooms’ with deathly silences may be replaced by more ‘interactive classrooms’.
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 "The Ginormous School Bag")
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