Bihar scripts arithmetic of success

Bihar scripts arithmetic of success

Sumit Pandey
CNN-IBN
Updated 1000 hrs IST (+GMT 5:30), 16.02.06 Email Print

New Delhi: Students in Bihar are known for getting kidnapped.
But a survey conducted by National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) shows that Bihar's students are not only doing well, they're doing better than the kids in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

They may not get the right infrastructure or a good school to complement their talent, but Bihar?s young brains are toiling their way to the top.

Bihar's children are way ahead of other states in the country including the famed Kerala and Tamil Nadu when it comes to doing Math. In fact, these kids love maths.
?I love tables, calculations and the sums. I love studying math,? a girl student says.

The survey was carried out in over 500 schools spread over 108 districts of the country on a sample size of 88,000 students.
The results were startling and showed Bihar students topping mathematics with 63 percentage points as compared to Kerala where boys and girls scored a meagre 35. Students from UP students secured just 37 percentage points.

Those from Tamil Nadu came close with a relatively high 58 per cent. The survey was a proof enough that Bihar's underpaid teachers are winning a battle that had long seemed lost.

"We have a different way of teaching. We teach them by the play-way method. This way, they don?t even feel the pressure of conventional learning," a schooteacher from Bihar, says.

Politicians from Bihar are known for their political arithmetic and caste mathematic. And the students from the state, despite known infrastructre problems, are not far away when it comes to calculating and are much ahead of their counterparts.