To Teach and Learn

Stories have always been part of our lives. We grow up listening to bedtime stories, we watch movies and read books but writing a good one is so difficult. Story writing carries 30 points out of 100 in the English BHSEC (Year 12) exams. Another 30 points are for argumentative essay writing and the remaining cover the language and the grammar. A student has to manage writing all of the above within 3 hours. Say if we budget the time: 1 hour for essay, 1 hour for a story and the remaining 1 hour for the rest. So, finishing it can be very stressful. I have to teach my students to write a good story within one hour. I manage to teach but I am not confident if I can write a good one myself within 1 hour. So, in my class, we try to work out a few plots which we may be able to fit into any plot that is demanded by the question. Slight changes to the plot and we are writing the story asked by the question. Some of the things we can have ready for a story are setting, the main character,

The story 'Test' written by Theodore Thomas is studied in class twelve. It is a futuristic story where people who want a driver's license are made to go through hypnosis. The State hypnotizes the applicants and they are made to experience a traumatic accident. The man who represents the State mentions that the primary objective of the test is to make drivers more careful. But what the State truly intends to achieve through the test is to make the people refuse their driving license. And those people who still want a license even after the traumatic experience are taken into custody. The theme of the story is very interesting and it presents a lot of room for critical thinking and interactive sessions in the classroom. We can have debates and panel discussions on the theme. The theme is "Ethics of the power of the state to control its citizens".  So, as expected, discussing the theme was very interesting. It was very interactive. We started with question