The joy of seeing the most beautiful smiles when they see their teachers first thing in the morning. I miss all this and more,” writes Shylaja Purushotham, principal of National Public School in Bengaluru, now running online classes amidst the lockdown.
To express the strangeness and sadness she feels at the school being empty, she took to paper and penned her thoughts down in the form of a beautiful
poem.
She says, “Usually at this time when the summer holidays are over we look out for our students to come back to school and we are excited to welcome them and start a new year and new journey with them.”
But this year, due to coronavirus safety precautions, schools in Bengaluru are still shut down or operating online.
Shylaja says, “We are waiting and waiting but, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, there seems no end to our waiting. We don’t know when we are going to see our students.”
She says that while they have been successfully able to shift their mode of instruction to online classes, a big part of school is still missing for her.
“The teachers are now busy teaching their online classes,” she says. “But every day when I come to school, I see the empty classrooms, corridors, and sit and think, when are my children going to come back to me? When is the school going to feel like a school again? With those sentiments echoing in my mind, I decided to write this poem.”
Shylaja further says, “School online in this new normal isn’t much like a school.” She believes that children, as social beings need to learn to get along with each other and develop social and emotional skills which are absolutely important in this day and age.
“Most of the time at home they are glued to gadgets,” she says. “Often even working parents don’t have much time to spend with them. I often feel that school is the only place where students can be themselves and interact with their classmates and teacher. Now I feel that is taken away.”
“I hope that everything settles down and the children return to school,” she writes at the end of her poem. Shylaja also shared her poem on her school’s and personal Facebook page.
She received many responses from educators who have wanted to make it into posters and put it up into their school.
“They feel that I have echoed what each one of them has been thinking,” she says.