CHENNAI: Two city students — one killed his teacher and the other ended life fearing failure in exams — have in a day displayed what counsellors have been advocating against for years. Excessive pressure to perform during examinations will cause harm than help students who are already on the brink during exam time.Like the Tamil adage that elucidates that an excess of anything can be poisonous, it is the unending array of exams that now put pressure on children, according to S Arumainathan, president of the Federation of Tamil Nadu Students-Parents Welfare Association.“Children are clearly being pushed to a corner. They have too many exams to study for. Schools hold special classes even on government holidays and Sundays. At home, recreational activities are curbed. This overdose is wreaking havoc and not at all helping in reaping benefits,” he says.Students are clearly more vulnerable this year as they constitute the first batch that take exams under the Uniform School Education System, Arumainathan adds. “If the government announces that the evaluation process this year will be more liberal than before — because the students are tested for a new syllabus — it could work wonders in putting students at ease,” he opines.While it may be advisable to take measures to keep children composed, counselling in itself is not a great idea at this point, according to reputed counsellor Saras Bhaskar. “The process of counselling a student should ideally begin early in the academic year. February is too late a time to even counsel students about their performance in the exams. At the most, I only teach them time management skills now,” says the counsellor.Recreating a semblance of normalcy can also help the psyche of a student, who could otherwise be jittery about the exams. “There are no curbs on TV and Internet time for my son. And he continues to score well without such restrictions. A normal study schedule is good enough for a student to score well,” says Raghavan, parent of a Standard X student in a private school in Gopalapuram.The twin tragedies in city schools have also brought to focus the long-term demand to make availability of counsellors compulsory in schools. “The boy who killed his teacher will not have done so on the first day that he felt insinuated. He must have vented his ire in different ways, which might have gone unnoticed by the teachers. The school staff should be trained to understand the psychology of students,” Arumainathan explains.We have now instructed schools to instill confidence in students by talking to them extensively during prayer sessions or during classrooms, says J Angelo Irudayasamy, Inspector of Matriculation Schools.
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