The familiarity of “Paraphrasing” to Indian students
The only method majority of Indian students have taken to learn in school is through rote learning, what we call in our own language or “desi bhaasha” as rattafication. The only quality that Indian students excel at is printing the entire textbook into the exam papers without even looking at the textbook to copy-paste it. They have excelled in this quality at such frightening levels that they actually leave the same amount of space between the words and put the exact punctuations on the exact locations as in the textbook. Okay, this may be a little bit of an exaggeration but one hopes that the reader is getting the point that the author is trying to get at. While rattafication may be good in the short-term to get good results and do your parents proud for a couple of days, it is going to create devastating loss in the long-term in terms of knowledge as on paper, the student is expected to have that knowledge but practically speaking they have already forgotten 80–90% of what they learned by rote learning.
There are several ways to dissolve this whole rattafication wave that the students are riding willingly or unwillingly. One of them was discussed in a blog posted previously (Grading and its effects on confidence on students) as to how getting rid of pointless quizzes and tests and delaying assessments of students can boost student’s creativity and confidence. Another method that will be discussed is to start making students paraphrase what they read and take note of those paraphrases.
Paraphrasing is a big hit in the western culture as not only teachers but students also get to know themselves as to how much of a understanding they have developed while they are putting what they learned in their own words. They can hence improve and bring creativity in their method of learning to increase their understanding of the respective topic or subject. Students realizing their mistakes by themselves rather than teacher pointing them out for them has been significantly more effective since one can remember. Paraphrasing also helps teacher as not only going to put less burden on them but also their students are improving by themselves, which for a teacher is like a dream. Even if students are not able to recognize where they have gone wrong, it still easier for teachers to point out and help students the areas they need to improve on all because the words that are written on the paper do not belong to the textbook, but rather the student him/herself.
