A letter from your children
Ratnesh - Aarohi
Dear Friend
This is a letter not from us, but from your children. It requires a response from you to them. We are confident that children would like to hear from you.
In the form of some questions and ideas, this letter just has sparks, which you can use to light up your own fires. The idea is to burn out what is not needed and bake, grill and deep fry our children’s actual potential.
Happy cooking.
Aditi & Ratnesh from Aarohi
Dear Mummy and Papa,
Why do you teach? No, we are not asking what motivates you, rather questioning your basic premise that we need to be taught.
What will happen if you give up this belief and give us the right and might to learn by ourselves?
What if you were just there somewhere in the home – available as a resource – if we happened
to need some guidance?
What if when we do come to you for guidance, you refuse to offer it? Rather you show us the
immense resource we have inside us.
What if when we were to beg you to teach us you point us to peers who can do an equally amazing
job of teaching?
What if when we are totally lost – you also get lost (unavailable to us)? Left high and dry, we will then push ourselves to further create what we will need all our lives – abilities – to solve, to ideate, to understand, to assimilate, to correlate, to beat ourselves?
What if we give up and that is the occasion you do not give up on us. You hit us back: you do not
make it easy for us, you make it more exciting for us. You bring in more ingredients, you add new
twists to the tale and yes, you twist our tails too.
Why do you sweat? No, we are not talking about your secretion glands, rather questioning your
approach – you take your job of parenting too seriously.
What will happen if you give up this pedestal and step down and join us? Accept us as colleagues?
We see you harried between controlling, dictating, worrying, judging, scolding, comparing, etc. We know this juggling is no fun.
What if running the home becomes a cooperative endeavour?
When you see us as kids you are always trying to please us.
When you see us as irresponsible you are always trying to control us.
But if you see us as co-workers then we ALL transform into a team of raring professionals out there to conquer every learning peak!
What if you delegate almost all your responsibilities? No, let us rephrase, what if we all share the responsibilities of learning and living together?
What if all that happens in family - good, bad, ugly, difficult, easy, - everything is our co-responsibility. What if we share - taking turns.
You will observe that when you start sharing your responsibilities with us – things will not always work fine. We will make mistakes, we will omit, forget, mismanage and even be completely irresponsible.
What if at every mishap you see the opportunity for more effort, more challenges and more growth? With every bad job we will learn more about life.
Why do you not learn? No, we are not doubting your capability or skills, rather suggesting – how about you becoming a student too? Learning something new, like how we are.
Remember, we are learning new stuff everyday – from Newton’s law to our behaviour, from football
tackle to Hindi matra to coral reefs – hundreds of new concepts and skills. All this learning business can
be very challenging for us.
What if you take up some new learning – say playing the flute or doing salsa or writing Haiku?
We think if you are a student too, you will relate to us more closely, understand our anxieties more
deeply, empathize with our struggles better, inspire our efforts more impactfully! Indeed it would be great
to share stories of our struggles, we can laugh at our failures or cry over our hardships and yes glow in
our successes.
Why do you assess? No, we are not doubting your judgment, rather questioning your objective.
Do you want us to become a better person? Or do you want us to become better at knowing how to become a better person?
What if you handed us the task of assessing ourselves?
What if you made us praise ourselves?
What if you let us test ourselves?
What if, when we have doubts, you shared with us – observations (and only observations) about us?
What if, when you saw arrogance in us, you shared with us – observations (and only observations) about
us?
What if instead of pointing out, you be a mirror in which we can see ourselves?
Dear Mummy and Papa,
You are dear to us – for many reasons, but by far the most important is that you have decided that we are
important. Not only have you decided, but DAILY, you wake up, walk up and look up to us. Thank you.
With apologies to Yeats, we end this letter with a quote:
But we, being learners, have only our dreams;
We have spread our dreams under your feet;
Tread wisely because you tread on our dreams.
Inviting you to JAGRITI: A program to help parents and teachers awaken that magic in theirs and children's life. Next online evening batch starts 19Jan2018 See: aarohilife.org/jagriti
Jagriti is spread over eleven sessions conducted twice a week, late evening (8-11pm). This makes it easy for all to attend.
Queries contact Ratnesh (Ph: 98450-45833)
Aarohi Website | Aarohi on FB
Aarohi is a community of self directed learners - Children who decide what they want to learn, how they want to learn, when they want to learn and use self assessment. We do not follow any philosophy, we follow the child. Aarohi offers an open learning environment at:
Aarohi O-Campus: Bodichipalli Village, Kelamangalam, 16km from Hosur, 55km from Bangalore (in Tamil Nadu) Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/JQx0H