Home science · Class 9-10 · Chapter 1 · The stages of home management
The four stages.
The last section said why a household is managed. This one says how, and the answer is four stages in order: planning, organising, control, evaluation. The order is not arbitrary; until one is done the next has nothing to work on.
So much money, so much time
The figures are for illustration; they are not market prices.
Money appears in this note only in that one widget, and the figures are classroom illustrations: not the book's numbers and not any market's. What is to be learnt is not the sum but the way of dividing it.
1. The resources are limited, the needs are not
Play with the board a little and the spine of the chapter comes to hand. Choose the best level in every row and the demand runs over on both counts, in money and in time. So something has to give. And here is the thing that matters: giving something up knowingly is not the same as letting it drop unnoticed. The real work of planning is to make that choice deliberately.
The board shows something else as well. One resource can be turned into another, up to a point: spend money and you save time, spend time and labour and you save money. But the exchange is not complete. No amount of money buys a twenty fifth hour.
2. Planning
Planning is the course of action settled beforehand: deciding, before a hand is laid on the work, what will be done, how it will be done and why. It is the first step, and the other three stand on it.
The book names the marks of a good plan one by one. The views of the members are asked and the advantages and disadvantages weighed. Work is shared out according to skill, capacity and experience. The plan is flexible, so that it can be changed at need. It is simple and plain. And it is acceptable to everyone in the household.
Each has a reason behind it, and once you have the reason the list stops being something to memorise. A plan that will not bend collapses the moment a visitor arrives. A plan that is not simple cannot be followed. And a plan nobody accepts is not followed at all, which is to say it is not a plan.
3. Organising
The book's definition: organising is the joining up of the household's various tasks according to the plan that has been adopted. Here it is settled where and how each piece of work will be done. In short, organising is the bringing together of the work, the people and the resources.
Organising has three stages of its own. First, setting the parts of the work in a line, which is to say cutting the task into pieces. Second, deciding what comes before what, which is to say the sequence. Third, building the frame of the work so that different people carry the pieces, which is to say who does which.
Confusing planning with organising is the commonest mistake here, and the difference fits in a line. Planning says what and why; organising says who, where, how and in what order. Khichuri today is a plan. The rice soaks first, someone else cuts the vegetables, and since there is one stove the lentils go on before anything else, is organising.
One thing about that third stage is worth saying, because the book says it itself. Who does which piece of work follows from skill, capacity and experience. Whoever has the time takes the cutting; whoever has the most experience at the stove takes the stove. The question is what each person can do and who has the time, and nothing else.
How much time sharing the work saves
This formula is not the book's; it is a simple model built to put the idea of organising into your hands. There is nothing in the formula to memorise, only the point it makes.
What you type goes nowhere. The page is yours.
4. Control
The book's definition: seeing whether everyone in the household is orderly at the work of reaching its goal. The plan is on paper; control is out where the work is. And control does not mean ruling anyone; it means keeping the work on its road.
Control has three levels within it, and this is the part most often asked about. Getting the work going, which is taking it up and starting it; in the book's words, knowing what has to be done and how makes it easy to begin. Watching, which is seeing, while the work is in hand, whether the resources are being used properly and how well it is going for the time it is taking. And adjusting, which is fitting the work to the circumstances, meeting a problem when one appears, and where necessary altering the plan a little and taking a fresh decision.
5. Evaluation
Evaluation is the judging or testing of what the work produced, and the book calls it plainly the last stage of home management. It has four aims: to find whether the goal was reached, to measure the success or the failure, to look for the cause of the failure, and to arrange the mending of it next time. In the book's words, without evaluation the success or failure of the work cannot be determined.
Watching and evaluating are not the same thing, and an examination will ask. Watching happens while the work is going on, to keep it on its road, and it is a level inside the stage of control. Evaluation happens after the work is done, to judge it, and it is a stage of its own.
And the last stage is not the end. What the evaluation turns up, the cause of a failure above all, goes into the next plan and changes it. So the picture is not a line but a closed circle; and that returning is what makes home management a continuing, moving process.
One meal, through the four stages
What the book says. Planning is the course of action settled beforehand: what will be done, how and why, decided before it begins.
In today's cooking. Lunch for seven. The menu settled: rice, lentils and a vegetable. The household was asked, and one person cannot take chilli. Two hours in hand. One has an examination today and was left out of the reckoning. The plan is simple, it will bend, and everyone accepts it.
What the book says. The joining up of the tasks according to the plan adopted: the bringing together of work, people and resources.
In today's cooking. Cutting the work into pieces: washing and soaking the rice, cutting the vegetables, the lentils on, the rice on, the vegetables cooked, the serving arranged. Setting the order: one stove, so the lentils first because they take longest, then the rice, then the vegetables; and the rice goes to soak before anything, because it does its own work. The frame of the work: whoever had the most time took the cutting, whoever had the most experience took the stove.
What the book says. Seeing whether everyone is orderly at the work of reaching the goal. Three levels sit inside it.
In today's cooking. Getting it going: everyone knew their piece, so the work started without delay. Watching: after the lentils went on it was clear the cutting was not finished, which meant the time was slipping. Adjusting: two guests arrived in the middle of it; the plan was not thrown away but the lentils were made to go further. It could be done because the plan would bend.
What the book says. The judging or testing of what the work produced; the last stage of home management.
In today's cooking. The goal was a meal for seven in two hours; it fed nine and took two hours and ten minutes. The success: the meal was made, nobody went without, and the condition about the chilli was kept. The failure and its cause: ten minutes over, because the cutting began after the stove was lit. The mend: next time the cutting comes before the stove.
Round again. Evaluation is the last stage and not the end. What came out of it today, that the cutting began too late, goes into tomorrow morning's plan. That returning is what makes home management a continuing, moving process.
The numbers in the story are for illustration: seven people, two guests, two hours and ten minutes. They are not the book's example.
One question
Two guests arrive while the cooking is going on, and the lentils are made to go further. Which part of home management is that?
6. Naming the stage from the work
An examination rarely gives you the name of a stage; it gives you a description of the work. The four cards below carry no names, only a line about what happens at that stage. Put them in order.
The four stages, in order
Another question
What is the essential difference between watching and evaluating?
Last question
A household task takes one person 120 minutes. Thirty per cent of it cannot be shared. If two people split the rest equally, how long does it take?
At a glance
The four stages. Planning, organising, control, evaluation; and what the evaluation finds returns to the planning.
Planning. The course of action settled beforehand. A good plan asks the household, shares the work by skill and experience, bends, stays simple, and is acceptable to all.
Organising. The bringing together of work, people and resources. Three stages: cutting the work up, setting the order, building the frame of who does which.
Control. Three levels: getting the work going, watching it, and adjusting to what comes.
Evaluation. The judging of the result; the last stage. Four aims: whether the goal was reached, the measure of success or failure, the cause of the failure, and the mending of it.
Source: Home Science, Classes 9-10 (NCTB), Chapter 1 “Home management”, the section on its stages. Whether the book numbers its sections could not be checked, so they are named by their headings. Every figure in the allocation board and in the cooking story is an illustration and not the book's, and the formula for sharing work is not the book's either.