Kolkata schools go 'extra' curricular to help Covid-awkward pupils

KOLKATA: Several schools in the city are taking special "out-of-syllabus" steps to ease pupils back to classrooms after teachers noticed a number of them displaying signs of "Covid awkwardness" - a difficulty in getting back to the classroom after nearly two years of the pandemic.
Schools reported a large number of pupils struggling to interact with their classmates, or staying unusually quiet during classes, attributing it to being homebound since the pandemic struck, with only parents for company. That, they said, had an adverse impact on their behaviour, leaving them struggling in class.
In order to make pupils readjust, schools have done several things: from reducing the numbers of class tests to include more non-academic activity classes, allotting a period each day for such activities, to bringing ahead the exam calendar to add additional activity days.
Rammohan Mission High School has reduced the number of class tests throughout the year, from 60 to 40. On these 20 spare days, the school has introduced non-academic activities. "We had noticed that some students were not paying attention during classes, making a lot of spelling mistakes, and some were misbehaving," said principal Sujoy Biswas. "We have been involving students in various activities like art and craft, for which we are teaming them up with groups of classmates. We arranged confidence-building sessions, too," he added.