Ruby's First Exam

Meghu and I had decided to conduct Ruby's first exam in English ever since we began teaching her in October this year. I formulated the test which involved picture recognition, action verbs, Hindi equivalents of English words, English equivalents of Hindi words, recognition of colours and a free recall test. Altogether a total of 50 marks.

She scored 86%, and the difficulty level was set to 'easy'. I saw her make very silly mistakes, and at the same time brilliantly recall some rather difficult things. I think she could have done better, nonetheless.

We had already decided to take Ruby and her sister out for a movie and a visit to a mall (they have never had this experience yet), but that didn't work out due to various dynamics. And then we considered the point that her rewards can become bigger as she learns more and more and performs better over time.

So we gift-wrapped a cool stylish handbag, a notebook and 3 colour pens to egg her on for studying more.  We told her these would be her study materials, that she must get these every day to be able to write new words.

She has been 'forgetting' to do this, and I am not quite happy about it. We might have unwittingly been very lenient with her, and so been being taken for granted. But it is not about us, it is about her education. I am realising that education is not just gaining knowledge. It is also learning healthy and helpful attitudes in life. It is time to teach Ruby a bit more about gratitude and respect.