Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par had been the talk of the town. One day, after watching the film, my friend told me the story of her five-year old son.
She was preparing him for his English dictation examination. The child was having difficulties with two words. He had been continuously spelling "palm" as "plam" and "tragedy" as tradegy". My friend told him to relax and allowed him to go down and play.Next day, as he came back from school, he started ringing the door bell restlessly. On opening the door, my friend saw her son standing with a very happy and smiling face. "Mummy, my teacher didn't ask "plam" and "tradegy" in today's exam. He sounded so relaxed!
After a few days, I was checking my college papers. In one paper, the student wrote the word "tragedy" as "tradegy" a number of times. I showed the paper to my friend and we had a hearty laugh at the coincidence.
About a month later, I was checking HSC Board papers and I came across one student's paper, who prior to writing a long word, wrote a part of the word before writing the actual word. For instance, before writing "similar" or "difficult" he or she wrote "mil" or "fic" before the actual word. The entire paper was full of such instances.
In my 15 years of teaching, I must have seen many such cases before. But, on all those occasions, I always thought of them as absentmindedness. This is the first time I took it as a learning difficulty of the student who should be treated compassionately. I realised every child is special. Thank you, Aamir Khan!
