Are you even listening?

Are you even listening to what I said? It is so exasperating when the person you are talking to is simply not listening to you! Listening apparently is an important life-skill that, strangely enough, a lot of us lack! Poor listening skills can be blamed for marital discord, lack of teacher-student engagement, and it might even lead towards arguments between colleagues at the workplace. When you step outdoors and visit the petrol pump, you ask the gas attendant to fill the tank with a thousand Rupees worth of Petrol, he assumes you had asked for Rupees five hundred worth! You get irritated, but then ask him to add another five hundred worth of fuel. A waste of time indeed. But then, this is a relatively harmless kind of disability. A more serious problem arises when a teacher in a classroom gets into a direct confrontation with his or her students and then things heat up. Things become so bad that a sense of hostility, animosity and aggression enters into the relationship between students and their teachers. This is more serious!

We have, in our eagerness to be more experiential than others, taught our students to be evaluative. Sometimes this is taken too far by the students. Some of them will simple question stuff, not even listening to what has been said by the teacher or the presenter! Sometimes these lapses appear to be too silly. "Did you listen to what was being said?" is a phrase that many a teacher would have said to his students. Unfortunately being too evaluative becomes a barrier to listening and the casualty could be a broken marriage, discord in the class or a hostile work culture. Over-analysis gives you a lopsided, selective perspective. You never realise that perhaps it was not meant as such, "they didn't mean to hurt you", "you assumed wrong!" Yes, constant evaluation leads to verbal duels that can really turn very ugly!

Sometimes people are so vulnerable that they become over-protective! They carry an emotional baggage that causes them to retreat into a shell. Such people will simply not listen to you even if what you are saying is sensible and rational. Such people will often repeat the same story about their emotional experiences with an intensity that will increase with each retelling. Often we might even become impatient with such people and decide to move on to the next person. People who are not open to sharing ideas might be people who are most vulnerable and they are trying to protect their themselves from being made fun of.
A lot of students in the class will jump the gun and answer a question before you have even framed it! They guess the answer or even assume the answer before listening to the whole questions. Their answers can be most surprising because they fall flat the moment you complete your question and everyone starts to laugh. This learning defect can be the result of plain impatience, boredom, or even a lack of being with the moment. In many cases, jumping the gun and assuming the answer before really hearing out the question might appear rather audacious and insulting to the teacher in class. It shows lack of respect for the teacher and might even appear presumptuous. The common laws of respect are brushed aside by the presumptive speaker.
Prejudice precedes all good efforts. Listeners who are biased against another person will never listen to him or her rationally or with an open mind. When you are prejudiced against another person, you block yourself to what he or she is saying, you counter, argue and simply put that person down because you've been told that that person is bad, a masochist, a sadist, or even a tyrant. Prejudiced listening is not listening at all. It often ends up in a total breakup of communication. The speaker often ends up facing an impassable wall of impassive listeners. Hostile eyes glare at the speaker and nobody wants to listen to a demagogue in any case.
Some people will criticize others just for the sake of criticizing and gaining attention. They are the judgmental listeners who take upon themselves the task of being critics ready to share their opinions without even listening to another person. In class is often happens that students gang up and pounce upon a fellow classmate who might have just begun to answer a question. They will not even listen to their friend complete his answer. Like the critic, the self-appointed judge will cause a lot of embarrassment to the speaker forcing him to retreat into a shell.
Selective listeners are those who will listen and agree only with things that they agree with. As long as their opinions are validated, they will continue to be active listeners, but then as soon as the conversation shifts to a topic that they are not interested in, they will withdraw from the conversation.
But then these are scenarios one observes not just in the classroom but also in everyday life. The ability to listen is an important life skill and it is even an important leadership trait. The basic unit of the society is the family and the family is built around an important set of rules. The family, a microcosm of the whole world is built around a mutual give and take mutual respect, love, and even sacrifice. A lot of clashes in the family result from lack of communication or perhaps even a misunderstanding of what is being communicated. When one of the partners shouts back, "But did you even listen to what I was saying?" it is a sign that there has been a breakdown in communication. In most cases, this because one of the partners was really not listening to the other one carefully! Sometimes, one of the partners might be in a better job and thus a better position. Being used to be heard at one's place of work might make one more judgmental and authoritative than one's partner. An authoritative position at work makes one assume that he or she is the authority at home too! Presuming that one might maintain one's authority at home and thus listening to the other as if one is an authority can make for a very unbalanced relationship between husband and wife. I would equate this tendency with authoritarianism or for that effect dictatorship. No wonder, a grown-up person referred to his mother as a veritable dictator (rather humorously) as she had worked as a matron in a well-known hospital in Delhi and she had had a large number of nurses serving under her!
A good listener is a good person, and a good person might be a good student, a good husband,  a good wife a good teacher (in this case), a good father or even a good mother. The list is long and I have not added other professions because the list would be endless. As far as the importance of listening goes, we have come across anecdotes detailing how a patient who had to get his right foot amputated ended up getting his right foot amputated by a surgeon who had not listened to his instructions carefully. A student who was too zoned out ended up writing a speech instead of a debate for the very fact that he had not listened to his teacher's instructions carefully. The teacher who told his student that his answer was wrong had not listened to him carefully. The pilot who took off instead of aborting the takeoff had not listened to the air-traffic controller's last-minute warning carefully.

The above write-up is my take on the article: Are You Really Listening? 7 Barriers to Listening Effectively the link of which is attached below:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322563

Social Emotional Learning and Its Importance today

There is simply no doubt that Social and Emotional learning strategies help students feel better about themselves. The strategies help students integrate better into the larger fabric of social life, but then to suggest that S.E.L. is something new would be wrong. Surely, S.E.L. is a more scientific strategy of an older form of imparting sound social and moral values such done by family elders and in the form of "Moral Education" classes in the years gone by. We appreciate that Social and Emotional Learning helps to society a better and safer place to live in but then it is simply not a substitute for the first lessons in values taught by the child’s first parents, his or her parents. It is supposed to remove the cynicism and impatience that exists in our youth today. It is a more rational way of imparting a sense of ethics, social or emotional in a manner that would enhance a feeling of self-esteem and self-confidence. It is only when students feel great about how they are that they are able to perform better in class and outside of class. S.E.L. can at best attempt to add to or give value to the important values-based lessons that a child learns from his parents or grandparents about the importance of honesty, truthfulness, kindness, patience and hard work in life.

A lot of emotional stress is caused by the competitive nature of life today. Mechanization, the internet, AI, and data-intensive requirements have changed the social fabric to such an extent that we no longer settle for anything that is less than the best. These demands on students have resulted in the deterioration of self-esteem levels which in turn have led to a deterioration of performance. Unfortunately, in spite of attending so many Social and Emotional Workshops and modules, our students continue to be more and more impatient and cynical in attitude. Social and emotional learning should promote not only respect for humanity but also respect for Mother Earth, the environment, the ecology, and wildlife. 

I guess, silence times, meditation, introspection, and prayers might form an integral part of the Social and Emotional Learning or Teaching strategies. One favoured S.E.L. strategy is to use circle times in class as a means for sharing each other’s grief, or even sharing one’s feelings about others. Circle time sessions are effective in places where students feel safe while sharing their feelings. It is a great way of opening oneself up to others, a means to bond with others and a safe space where one can feel comfortable to be vulnerable in other students’ presence.

The need for S.E.L. learning strategies stems from a realization that most of our learners might not have sound emotional skills as a result of which they might not be able to integrate well into the social fabric. Lack of sensitivity towards others, inability to empathize with others, impatience, and a general feeling of restlessness is a cause for concern in parents as well as educators. Traditionalists might rant about how insensitive and unfeeling the youth might be, but then they probably don’t realize that times have changed and the youth is under more stress stemming from the need to perform in competitions. The internet revolution has ensured that learners pitched against better-informed rivals. Parents’ expectations have upped the ante.

The lack of a strong value-based system based on the joint family has had its impact on the learners today. We have seen a major shift from the joint family system to the nuclear family system which has lead to a deterioration in the strong value-based culture imparted by the grandparents and family elders in days passed. Storytelling times, family prayers and perhaps even anecdotes shared by family elders did equip young members of the family with a strong value based culture that would have equipped them to face social and emotional challenges posed by interacting with a larger social fabric. Today, a large number of children who live in nuclear families don’t even get to share quality time with their parents. The demands of work pressure, graveyard shifts, and the need to work harder in order to maintain high standards of living have robbed the youth of the basic support structure offered in the family as a basic unit of the society.

Clearly, therefore, family elders, grandparents, uncles, and aunts provided a social and emotional support base or structure for growing up children in the joint family. This has been going on since ancient times in India. But then, it was not just the joint family and in some cases, closely-knit families that provided a socially and emotionally rich culture; religious elders, temple priests, church priests, Granths of Gurudwaras and Maulvis of Mosques also gave children important teachings from religious texts. These teachings by religious heads provided children with a rich perspective of timeless values based on morals, ethics, justice, and work. Modern S.E.L. modules are doing what family elders used to do since time immemorial in joint families in India and perhaps even other countries, however, in a more scientific, rational and concise manner. The only difference is that the moral education that was once provided by the family and occasionally religious organizations is now being provided by the school. Children who accompany their parents to church often go to the Sunday school where they read specific readings from the Bible and they are taught values based on the religious scriptures. Unfortunately, fewer children go to church these days and this has reduced their exposure to important lessons from the Bible. The same might be said of children belonging to other religions. Kushwant Singh reminisces in one of his biographies, how when he was a little child and lived with his grandmother in a village, he would go to the Gurudwara with his grandmother. While went into the temple for her prayers, Kushwant Singh would go to the school attached to the Gurudwara where he was taught the alphabets and lessons from the scriptures. This is where he would have received his S.E.L. lessons in the traditional style.

It is important however to introduce a similar kind of teaching of values in school and this is where the S.E.L. module comes to play. With a change in family structure, a shift from the joint family to the nuclear family, and a shift from the single working parent nuclear family to a both parents working nuclear families, it has become imperative to address the social/emotional needs of children. Children who lack an emotional connect with their parents as a result of their parents spending more and more time at work combined with an absence of other family elders to guide them, children have become more vulnerable to bullying in school. Single children born into nuclear families often have difficulty in adjusting with other children in school. They often become victims to bullying or themselves become aggressive enough to bully others. It is exactly such problems that S.E.L. modules attempt to address today that too in the absence of a support structure at home. S.E.L. modules help children live healthy emotional lives in larger society. S.E.L. modules when integrated into the day to day curriculum of the school can help the student regain his or her self-esteem. The S.E.L. Casel Wheel can help us understand how social-emotional learning can help the child live a better life in absence of a sound family support system.

The Casel Wheel provides us with a pictorial representation of the various elements of Social Emotional Learning. According to the pictorial representation on the Casel Wheel, S.E.L. seeks to provide students with the opportunity to develop social awareness skills, relation skills, self-management skills, self-awareness skills, and decision-making skills. When the child enters into the larger community of the school or even the world outside the school, the child needs to know that he or she cannot expect to be the center of attention all the time. Nor can the child expect to be pampered by others. There are students who even after they reach the twelfth grade expect to be treated as “special”. A student who lives with her working mother explained how she liked to talk and socialize a lot in class because she stayed alone at home most of the time. What she did not realize was that she was creating a nuisance for the other students most of the time. Another student in grade twelve felt highly vulnerable while reading a passage from a lesson aloud in class. She would break down into tears if she was asked a question. She just did not want to break out of her cocoon! Another student felt he needed to step in when another student was reprimanded for some misdeed or the other. This student took it upon himself to fight for others. He liked to argue with the teacher just for the sake of arguing, or maybe there was something inside him that had made him feel so vulnerable, insecure and weak at heart. The three examples mentioned above indicate that these students might have had poor coping strategies, poor self-esteem, and very poor social skills.

Large Monitor Lizard Remains Spotted at the Basai Wetland

The Basai Wetland in Gurgaon has a tendency of springing surprises every now and then. Today when I visited the wetland I was in for a surprise as right there on the path was a giant monitor lizard of a most colorful kind. measuring a bit more than one and a half feet, it was lying on its side, perhaps, it had been attacked by a large bird, or had been hit by a moving vehicle. Another surprise sighting was a colourful Strawbery Finch bird. I have pasted the photograph below.

I did as a child see lots of monitor lizards close to my home in Arba Minch Ethiopia but then they were not as colourful as this one was. I wonder how much more beautiful this lizard would have been had it been alive. Unfortunately, no one seems to be bothered about preserving the Basai Wetland for posterity. Today as always there were people who were chasing away the Cormorants that were trying to land on the surface to hunt for fish. It was a disappointment for me especially because I wanted to photograph these birds actually diving for the catfish. I wonder with a bit of anger why the authorities are deliberately allowing this treasure trove of flora and fauna to be destroyed, that too with impunity! Wonder if there are not educated people who will take up the cause of protecting the wetland before it is swallowed whole by land sharks and greedy good doers.

The Church of Epiphany, Civil Lines hosts its Annual Garden Fete 2018

This year as always, the Church of Epiphany celebrated its Garden Fete in the month of November. In this case, the Anual Garden Fete took place on the eleventh. The Chief Guest on the occasion was the Rt. Revd. Waris K. Masih, the Bishop of the Diocese of Delhi,(CNI). The day started with the Sunday Mass and then this was followed by the Fete itself which went on till a half past five in the evening. The Annual Garden Fete was organised to support the completion of the church building at Sohna and provide funds for scholarships to deserving students, the widow pension and old age pension.

These three ladies did a great at the White Elephant stall. They were able to earn a good amount through the sale of clothes, books and other items. Few people expected them to be able to earn more than a thousand or two!

The Sunday School children presented a number before the gathering. They seemed to be self-led and did a great job too!

The release of the Garden Fete Brochure by the Rt. Reverend Warris K. Masih, the Bishop of the Diocese of Delhi (C.N.I) was another important event. A lot of hard work had gone into the brochure and what made things a bit challenging was that people kept on sending advertisements well after the deadline.

The Stalwarts of the Coupon stall, Mrs and Mr Sircar, Col. I.B. Thomas, made sure that everyone got their coupons without any fuss! An onerous task, indeed as they couldn't move out of their seats!

A happy moment to have Revd. Patrick Moti Lal on stage, and his son, Amit Lal. He served the C.N.I. Diocese of Delhi for many years.

A gathering of the members of the congregation who made all the difference. Many of them were the silent workers who contributed advertisements, sponsorships and there were those who took out time to make the purchases of the Raffle Ticket prizes.

The Three Musketeers, need I say more?

The singing divas mesmerised the gathering with their soulful numbers. The younger one amazed everyone with her singing.

Keema Puri, anyone?

The Tambola Team

The Raffle Ticket counter, Mr D.D.Lall and Mr Samuel at their posts.

It was no doubt a hectic day, but then a few of those present were able to take away the raffle prizes! Quite a few people stayed on till the announcement of the raffle prizes. The South Indian stalls provided some delectable items. The Fish-Fry maintained by Sam and Erica went strong, and so did the Fried Chicken stall run by the Sannoos!

Mixing up the Raffle Ticket Stubbs

As I said earlier, the Fish Fry and the Chicken Fry were out of this world! Both of these items went strong.

The Tambola game was played with great enthusiasm and no doubt it was a crowd puller! It was not just the children but their parents also who joined in the game.