Padma was undergoing training on Managing people in her company and was thrilled and spoke with excitement. “My company truly believes that each one of us must get training on job related skills or soft skills for two weeks every year. This course I am undergoing is exciting, great faculty and full of experiential games.” But what does this have to do with going from Kindergarten to graduation?
Well, Kaushik, never to miss an opportunity, to connect anything to Bridge wanted to have a discussion on Bridge Education. Kingo was first to speak, “We have formal education on Bridge nowadays. There used to be no formal bridge education say 25 years back. All the learning was by discussions and reading books.”
Padma who had undergone some basic training in Bridge shared her experience and said,” My experience was that education is good for learning the basics of the game and understanding how it is played. Classes for coaching at higher levels depends on the faculty and cohesiveness of the class. Since people in the class are at different levels of learning, it sometimes becomes chaotic with some people either dragging the class with basic questions or complicating it with too advanced questions.”
Prabha had a friend who was teaching Bridge full time. Based on her discussions with him, she added, “This game suffers from a severe lack of awareness. Many people don’t know the depth and breadth of this game. Some think it is too complex to learn and some think it is for old age people and hence getting fresh people to learn is a challenge.”
Kaushik, who had done some experience of bridge coaching wanted to hit the nail on the head. “The real issue is that bridge students listen to the teacher and follow the topics as sequenced by the teacher when they are beginners. After they learn the basics of the game, they google and get some sporadic knowledge of various tools gadgets and processes and learning becomes ad-hoc and becomes unstructured. This is very bad for the students as they enter the field with half-knowledge which is worse than ignorance”, said Kaushik.
Padma summarized it very well. She said, “We have school and college curriculum, and we just accept it and follow it without asking questions. Bridge Education does not have a standard step-by-step structure. Even if the structure is defined by the faculty, the students want to learn things by their priority.”
Kaushik just said “Well summarized Padma, I think you will make a good Bridge teacher.”
Tailpiece:
When we were puppies, our needs were the same as today. We were born as graduates with nothing left to learn, moaned the ever thinking Goofy.
