The Happy Success Way

Importance Of Hobbies In Students Life-

A child gives an average of around 14 years to his/her school life. It is during these years that the child learns to develop basic language skills, basic math, and sciences. The next couple of years provide a foundation of a detailed study of these subjects that continues till the end of the school year’s success. Hence, it becomes very important to include hobbies as a subject for them.

All of this creates a monotonous grind for the child. Where life just revolves around studies, tuitions, and home. With little or no time for pursuing hobbies or doing things that the child likes. The child just remembers the names of the European kings, names of poets, sin theta and cos theta, and the process of photosynthesis, and of course the most important fact in science: MITOCHONDRIA IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL.

But with all the advancements in technology, all such technical information is available with just a few searches on your smartphones. What a child requires is something more than that because today a person is judged on what extra other than academics knowledge he/she posses. This shows the importance of hobbies to be included as subjects to be pursued by students for success.

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you’re doing, you will be successful.’’-Albert Schweitzer

Hobbies Help Us Grow As a Person

Only seldom schools offer to help students explore such hobbies and reach to its maximum potential. One such evident example is of fine arts in the humanities stream, with cooking and painting and sculpture making and likewise activities. But again the scope becomes limited only to the creative field success. What about, film making, photography, traveling, theater, calligraphy, artificial intelligence, video games, book reading, creative writing, shayaris poetry writing, and the list can go on and on. Not only indulging in these activities relieve stress but, are important for skill development and making them stand out from the crowd.

In this 21^st century stress is an inevitable element in life and if not reduced it results in problems such as headaches, backaches, heart diseases, depression, anxiety, etc. It becomes relatively nice to pursue a hobby to relieve that tension and stress and maintain and healthy mind and hobby. The study, published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, followed over 100 adults as they went about their daily activities. After three days, the researchers found that people who engaged in leisure activities were 34 percent less stressed and 18 percent less sad during the activities. Not only did they report feeling happier, but their heart rates were lower—and the calming effect lasted for hours.

WHY SHOULD HOBBIES BE INCLUDED IN SCHOOL AS SUBJECTS:

1. A busy lifestyle tends to make us lose out on our hobbies. Including them in the school curriculum will inculcate a habit to practice them regularly.
2. Students will be stress-free for that one subject where there will be no standards for high or low performance.
3. Will help them to develop meaningful bonds with like-minded people, giving space for a lot of development and learning. It will give a chance to the children to understand fellow classmates and also it will help to meet new people.
4. Will inculcate discipline and patience in the students because developing a hobby requires that. These virtues will help the students when they pursue further studies and go for jobs as they will stand out from the crowd. It will also make you a more interesting person.
5. This subject will be their choice. It’ll not be a compulsion on them, like other subjects which they HAVE to do. It becomes something they want to do.
6. The students will also understand the repercussion that will arise out of their decisions for success
7. It helps to curb binging on social media in free time, and that time can be utilized in something productive. This is especially the problem with students where social media apps take away all of their precious time. They also help to keep you busy, as the famous saying goes,” Idle hands are devil’s workshop”
8. Practicing hobbies on a daily basis can improve confidence and self-esteem issues that will create a foundation for a mentally strong adult.
9. Not only hobbies can also be an additional source of income, for example, if you like to spend your time keeping your garden well-manicured and healthy, but you can also offer garden design services to other people and turn it into a full-time job.

Thus for all-round development of a child inculcating hobbies as the subject will be of more benefit to the students and the school as well. The school will benefit due to the increased performance of the students. And the students will be stress-free and will have an open mind towards everything new in life.

Grades & Marks Don’t Define Your Intelligence, But Strengths & Interests Do-

Nearly all our school life we are in a constant grind to get good marks. A child may be good at sports, or a brilliant singer or dancer, a talented artist, a phenomenal poet but the second the child scores a B or even a C in some subjects some teachers and parents make the child believe that it’s the end of the world.

Student suicides are becoming increasingly common in Kota, Rajasthan, considered the capital of India’s shadow education system. Its many commercial coaching centers, that guarantee success in professional entrance exams, pressure students into striving for unrealistic goals. Unable to cope with failure and anxious about letting their family down, a growing number of Kota students opt to end their lives.

So the big question arises how are grades the only definition for understanding an individual’s maximum potential? Let me put forward some examples for you that can not only break this notion but also destroy its very existence.

Today, the world knows about Akshay Kumar as a national award-winning actor and one of the most successful actors in Bollywood actor’s broad mass appeal. but before he became a star, he was a kid who failed an exam in school and was terrified of showing his report card to his parents. in a heartfelt video that he shared on Twitter the actor recently opened up about his own failures and how he used that as a springboard to chase his dreams.

He may be one of the most successful comedians in India today, with his own special on Netflix, but back in his schooldays, Vir Das was a below-average student who got underwhelming scores in his board exams success. The comedian took to Facebook to not only share his mark sheet but also to note, “Whether your results are amazing or not doesn’t prevent your personality from being amazing. At the end of each day of your life people remember who you are not how you did.

Biswa Kalyan Rath, the creator of some of India’s most viral videos on Youtube and one of the most sought-after comedians in the country, once felt like such a failure that he ended up with debilitating depression. Despite attending one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, he described himself as a below-average student in a Facebook post. Not only was he one of the few people from his batch who struggled to get a job after graduating, but he was fired within three months. He wrote, “These things made me feel like a spectacular failure. I was depressed for a couple of years and I lost around 8 kgs. I was thin, to begin with. Thankfully I had friends to support me throughout.”

Jon Snow is one of the most successful TV journalists in the UK, but he didn’t do so well at school. He got a C in English but failed his other subjects at A level, according to the BBC. In an interview, he told students to play to their strengths and to “want to do what you want to do very badly,” adding “there is life after A-levels.” After school, Snow went to college to gain more qualifications, which got him into the University of Liverpool. However, he was rusticated for taking part in an anti-apartheid socialist student protest in 1970.

“To everyone getting A-level results today, good luck but it isn’t the end of the world if you don’t get what you want,” Sarah Millican said in a tweet. “I got a D and E.” Millican is a highly successful comedian in the UK and has appeared on many panel shows including QI. She told her social media followers not to despair if they don’t get what they want in their exams. Her results have never held her back.

The above-cited examples are of the world’s greatest personalities who prove to the world that marks are just a way of measurement of one’s capability to memorize and vomit it out on the paper. Formal education however is important but the emphasis on that stage should also be on learning rather than memorizing.

Skills, therefore, top the list of education followed by practical learning because one thing is to be remembered that we are preparing students where they require practical knowledge not to be a competition to future robots in remembering the fact.

Instead of focusing on grades students strength should be assessed in the following skills:

1. Problem Solving
2. Creativity
3. Analytical Thinking
4. Collaboration
5. Communication
6. Ethics, Actions, and accountability

So let us initiate a learning system that channelizes its grading system towards something positive that is towards skill assessment and not on the capability to memorize and reproduce the same on a sheet with using our greatest gift of thinking…and take this as a signal and pick up and old hobby. Only happiness will await you then!

Author – Devashrita Gujral

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