Posts Tagged ‘coaching’
Coaching classes: Are they really necessary?
When I appeared for the IIT-JEE in 1999, many coaching classes in Kota and Delhi already had built up quite a strong reputation for preparing students for this exam. However, I did not attend any coaching class, in its popular class room form, but did take a correspondence course from Brilliant Tutorials. This course helped me to set targets for myself, and provided me feedback through all country test series. I was also in a small town in those days and classroom coaching facilities were really not available.
Once I reached IIT, however I found that there were numerous batch mates of mine, who had attended some or the other coaching. There used to be many discussions whether coaching is really necessary? The people who supported the idea of coaching were of the opinion that coaching classes provide a focus and an environment for students. I agree to this point whole-heartedly, but in my opinion, this “strength” of the coaching classes is really their greatest drawback.
I found that many(of course, not all) such “focussed” students lacked the depth in their subjects, because of inherent structure of these coaching classes which tell the “concepts” to students only to solve particular type of questions. A very simple example I witnessed was that not many had read Resnick and Halliday’s or H.C. Verma’s Physics, which I used to read with interest and excitement of a good thrilling fiction.. 
Also there is another problem, which I am finding with the students these days, is that, they are not at all in habit of “living with doubts”. This negative sounding phrase, actually implies that the students usually have a mentor with them always, who is more than ready to solve any doubt the student might have, no matter how trivial. And the mentor, in this process, feels great that he is helping the student. However, the student is becoming too dependent on the mentor and that killing spirit to solve any problem thrown on the student is reduced.
IMO, students should develop interest in and try to learn subjects. Subjects like Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics instead of IIT Physics, IIT Chemistry and IIT Mathematics.
