A few weeks back there was a news item in the media about an earthquake in Bhutan, with its epicenter at Mongar, a provincial town in the Eastern part of the country. The news took me down the memory lane to 1979, when I was teaching science in a junior high school in that town. The landscape was very picturesque and people very friendly. The school had a nice mix of buildings based on Bhutanese architecture as well as those built on modern lines.
Although, those were incomparably happy days, as teachers, we had to face problems due to lack of teaching resources. There was no library or laboratory. I had the pleasure of developing a science lab from scratch, but it was a bit time consuming. During my early months, I used to spend sleepless nights in exploring possibilities of how to make my children at the K-8 school learn what I taught. Thanks to my own exposure to short stories for children, I could use them in the classroom and children enjoyed them.
Once when I had to introduce the middle school physical concept “Archimedes Principle”, I could do so very easily by telling the story of a thirsty crow (from the Indian classic “Pancha Thantraa”).
The story is about a crow that was very thirsty on a hot day. There was no pond, lake, or any water reservoir nearby, except a tall mud-pot with some water. The crow found out that the pot contained some water, by tilting the pot a bit using its beak. Now the problem was: How to drink the water, its beak being too small to reach the water? After a bit of thinking, the crow got the idea: Drop small stones and pebbles into the pot, one after the other, carefully. The crow swiftly implemented this into action. As the stones and pebbles were being dropped, the water level inside the pot gradually increased. At one stage, when the water was reachable, the clever crow drank the water and was relieved of thirst.
When I told the story and demonstrated the action by using simple line sketches, my kids enjoyed the story thoroughly, and learned the concept more effectively later. I could have easily shown a demo to introduce the concept. But I preferred a story for the following important reason, which is overlooked:
Children enjoy “emulating” the “clever crow” and then do the activity themselves. If I had showed them a demo or asked them to do an activity, they would not have enjoyed it; they would have simply “followed” my “instructions”. Obviously, the former was better. This happened exactly 30 years back, when education technology was confined to OHP, Film Projectors and Tape recorders.
I have always used short stories and novels for teaching a range of curricular subjects and soft skills to my kids. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s classic “Fantastic Voyage” (novel as well as film) to teach middle school biology and Pancha Thanthraa stories to teach soft skills and values. Besides I have used my own stories to teach curricular subjects, soft skills and values.
Good stories can take children away from TV addiction and all related problems, as proved by educational and medical research. Print version of stories can tap the unlimited potential of imagination and creativity in children in a better way than audiovisual ones. I think that there is nothing like a nicely printed storybook.
