Last year I stumbled on a quote on a tragedy by Shakespeare. The quote says, “tragedy is misinterpreted comedy”. This means that everything that may give us mental and psychological stress is meant to put a smile on our faces or at least make us think “oh I see my mistake; I will make it work next time”.
Studies have shown us that at least 13% of the world’s population is suffering from a mental disorder (Our world in data; 2008). Both young and old adults are suffering from mental and psychological stress from tragedies that come their way as they perform their day to day activities.
Life tragedies although highly unpleasant are very common and they can lead to mental and psychological stress.
It has been argued that most human deaths and managed diseases are caused by stress- WHO
I am glad to inform every reader that as we try to manage our own stress, our children stress can also be reduced within the school system if high priority can be placed on our children dispositions to issues during their formative years.
From 0-8 years, a child’s character is yet to be formed, their characters can easily be defined by the people they interact with but from 8-18 years, they start forming their own characters.
The subjects we teach children in their formative years, how we teach them and how they perceive the things they learn can either help them have a better attitude towards learning or mar them.
Teaching-learning process will be fun and easy for kids if they are been taught how to do the mental reasoning of what they are been taught and replicating it on paper – Rhoda Odigboh.
It saddens me to know that I had once taught some curriculum lessons that they are rarely applicable to our children’s immediate environment.
Can you imagine what set of new generation we will create if “each topic or subject” taught in school during their character formative years has a way of teaching them the power of consistency, the virtue of patience, integrity, perseverance, empathy, courage. For example, in mathematics, we can have consistency in solving Mathematics problems, perseverance when failing Mathematics problems or in English, we can have empathy in use of English, the focus of storytelling, vision of story writing, etc.
This practice will be best to help our children, especially those in upper primary and secondary schools to develop the right attitude to learning since it is going to have a way of communicating morals to them and then save them from most shades of incidences that might appear as tragedies at their early age.
By Tosin Mike (tosin_mike2001@yahoo.com; 0813838630)