Happiness and Tolerance - Penta BHIS

The key to happiness….is tolerance of those who do not do as you do. -Jeanette Winterson

I was taken aback to find my new grade 7 extremely judgmental. The students had been together since they were six years old. Yet, they constantly fought and complained about each other. Disturbingly, even the parents had nothing good to say about their ward’s classmates or their parents. A couple of weeks into this disquiet, I realised that the students found nothing good in each other and hence, were unhappy at being forced to study together.

On being called in to resolve yet another argument, I was bombarded by a litany of complaints – each one more upsetting than the other. I suggested that they have every right to voice their grievances, but it can only be done on one particular day. We decided on using the last period every Friday for this purpose. In the next two Fridays, the complaints were noted down religiously. But the children also realised that they were beginning to forget the nature of their complaint.

Now, I made a new suggestion. Before a child complained of anybody, he/she would be required to state one virtue of that person. There was a gradual, but visible, change in my class of tweens. Some did not complain as they did not want to state a virtue, while others identified the goodness in their fellow students before bringing up an issue. The class was beginning to see each other more as peers than as competitors. By the time the year was over, they had begun to accept each other’s differences, work out a solution suited to all and even found a sense of camaraderie.

I had also learnt to accept them for who they were to find happiness as a mentor.

Penta @ Billabong High International School Thane
- Jeeji Sanjeev, Sanika Joshi, Arpita M G, Radhika Anand, Muskaan Menda, Supriya Karvankar & Bhavani Swamy