Students and Stress
Students and Stress should be oxymorons, like light and darkness together. A student’s mind is like an illuminated torch but stress may put out the light.
A student’s life is full of new learning challenges – do not transform these marvellous opportunities for growth into mere performance indices. If we, teachers and parents, keep the focus on learning processes rather than solely on performance outputs, then stress will vanish from the picture altogether. After all, students are less interested in their own actual grades than in parental responses to these. If parents and teachers invariably appreciate the positive effort made, then the hurdles still to be cleared will seem more inviting to the learner.
Why do human beings spend the most potentially productive years of their lives in educational institutions? This is a question we all – but especially the learner – must introspect on. It seems naïve to respond – to win prizes or degrees. Prize-winnings are confined to isolated moments of glory, frozen in time and forgotten. New benchmarks emerge as old records are broken. Besides, even at the beginning, we know that prizes are limited and cannot do justice to the effort put in by every single participant. Then why do we still strive, as learners? The answer is, to learn, grow and evolve with every effort made – not just for a career or an accolade – but to live! Hence, learning is for life.
Why aim for a distant prize in a distant future, which may or may not be ours in the end? That way we invite stress into our lives.
It is much better to live in the present moment, putting in our best effort, using every talent to the fullest, never backing down from a challenge and looking on failure as an opportunity to introspect and review our learning strategies. Not just students but we adults too, need to keep reviewing our teaching-learning-parenting strategies. Learning is very much an inward process, in response to external stimuli. The learner should therefor be fully aware of targets to be reached, strategies to help reach the target, and introspection on failure as well as success in order to determine the next step in life.
As you can see, learning to live is a complex process. There is no time or space for stress in this complex life process.
Dr. Sanjukta Sivakumar
Principal