Is Your Child Available For Schoolwork?

You probably may not quite understand what the question means. No, we are not talking about attendance record.

Your child might have a good attendance records, but for the days he spent in class, are they effective? Learning does not happen automatically. To be available for schoolwork, your child needs to be primed to receive knowledge and enjoy the process of learning. He must be physically, emotionally and intellectually plugged into the process to derive maximum benefits from his teachers and classroom activities.

Being physically available
A physically available pupil doesn’t just sit in class and listens. He reasons, remembers, focuses, carries out instructions, maintains eye contact and participates in jokes and humour. Such pupils typically will be able to manage distractions that can occur in the classrooms, such as, people passing by the corridor, someone entering the room or the fidgeting classmate across the room. They can effectively filter these distractions out and shift their attention back to the lesson.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of pupils who, despite being physically present in the classroom, are actually only ‘half present’. These are kids who might not have a proper breakfast. With a lack of fuel they have low energy level and their minds’ gets dulled easily. Some may not have proper bedtime and hence stay up late watching TV or playing computer games. They are physically unavailable.

Being emotionally available
The emotionally available pupils comes to school with a healthy self esteem, free from illness, have enough friends to feel a sense of belonging and whose parents value education. Such pupils feel psychologically safe in the classroom environment and therefore learning can take place comfortably. They fit in. With their ‘internal environment’ taken care of, these pupils will find it easy to put attention on the external learning activities taking place in the classroom.

Pupils who have to grapple with family problems, death of a close friend or family member, break-ups in friendship and other negative experiences go through the day with ‘internal turbulence’. Their attention tends to be focused inwards rather than outwards. This is the reason why when death occurs in the school counselors are quickly deployed to work with pupils to resolve their emotional issues quickly. Friendship break-ups are a common occurrence at the primary school levels but parents should not just dismiss it as something normal. Keep in mind that the commonness of it doesn’t make the emotional pain experienced by your child any lesser.

Being intellectually available
Intellectually availability has nothing to do with intelligence of your child. A pupil may be very intelligent but intellectually unavailable. Intellectual availability comes with emotional availability.

When a pupil feels that he fits in with the rest of his class, he will be more willing to take intellectual risks. For example, the emotionally available pupil will more likely to offer an answer to a teacher’s question even if he is not sure whether his answer is right or wrong. Compare this to another pupil who has the right answer, but dare not share it for the fear of being laughed at or looking foolish. In some healthy classroom environments, pupils don’t hesitate to give answers because they know that even if their peers laugh at their answers, they are still accepted as part of the team.

Being intellectually available will help the growth of your child’s intelligence. In the classroom, the teacher must manage a positive emotional climate in the classroom. At home, parents also must make consistent checks on the emotional climate at home.

Conclusion
A healthy learner is one who has optimal energy to actively participate in the learning process, able to manage attention, sustain interest in the classroom and generally has a healthy relationship with his classmates.

Parents must move beyond looking at grades as an indicator of achievement and take an active interest in ensuring that their children are also physically, emotionally and intellectually available for schoolwork. If your child is unavailable, even the best teachers and most interesting lessons will not help.