learning is intellectual, emotional and physical

 

I taught years 5 to 12 for Maths in a school called The Valley school, Krishnamurti foundation school in Bangalore, India. I was a campus resident teacher and so also helped out in the evening prep and kitchen duties. This was years 2002-2006.

The school is set up in a beautiful forest. Hence the forest is a part and parcel of the school or rather the school is inside the forest. Every house is built being sensitive to the flora and fauna and without disturbing any of the tress. Hence there are houses built around a tree! This ensures that children grow very sensitive to the environment. It was common for students to run around bare feet, sleep under a tree, swim in the lake or grab gently a spider in their room and place it outside the window. One was expected to be sensitive. Evenings were silent. Just the tress and murmurings of the people.

And that brought with it its own challenges. The wild animals often strayed into the school campus without any clear demarcation or boundary. The forest guard had to be called. Houses were not very strong. Students would often want to be outside the classrooms, concrete of the buildings bothered, and internet was always bad!

The school was from grades 1 to 12, k-12 and followed the regular national curriculum. Till grade 8 there were no exams and from 9^th started the exam-based learning in full swing. The math syllabus was regular, but I had full freedom to devise my own strategies to transcribe it. There was freedom to innovate. Which brought the challenge of those who did not know how to handle the freedom! Laziness stepped in or individual egos clashed. Failing to have a clear guidance structure, freedom was taken as licence by students and teachers.

Learning was considered to learn to be ‘sensitive’ to self, to life and environment. Within that sensitivity everything operated. Some of the finest teachers are what I came across in the school, who lived the fact to perfection. However, since they could not transfer their wisdom to other teachers, we felt ‘headless’.

All of this gave the students a very safe space to learn, but the students who wanted to learn. The ones who did not, used the opportunity to go wild. I always wondered if this is true learning! The challenge for me always was getting the work done, homework, focus in the classes…for I was asked to build a relationship with students if they did not work. That was quite annoying, for I wasn’t always able to build the required relation.

So, I would say, the school gave a safe space to learn but was not able to exert the discipline that made learning happen towards excellence. So safe space, emotional space, is a must for learning. Other strategies come later.

I would say hence learning is intellectual, emotional and physical. All three factors come into place for learning to happen. In this school, the emotional space was there, the physical environment was there however a lack of intellectual rigour held back a lot of learners.