Alternative Education-Can we or We can't...

My sister and I were speaking about Projects being given to children in schools nowadays, an attempt to "modernize" education and make learning "fun".
However, lacking creativity in almost all aspects, concept, execution, submission, these projects are a colossal waste of time, money and valuable resources.
A few days ago, my sister, who's been teaching in an inclusive education based school for 12 years, had to give her class an English assignment for the holidays. Her co-teacher immediately suggested that the children could collect information on Vikram Seth since he was the author of the poem, The Frog and the Nightingale that was the subject of the assignment.
My sister had thought of making the children write an obituary for the Nightingale in the form of a Haiku or a Limerick. She has realised over the years that giving children straight, download from the internet projects don't make sense anymore. A few years back, it was important to give such projects to children because teachers wanted to establish the fact that research is possible through the internet. Now, it doesn't matter because they will log on to the net before doing any other form of research!
The fact is they will turn to the internet to understand what a Haiku or Limerick is but will eventually have to write it on their own. Even of they ask their parents or friends to write on for them (!) they will have to explain the poem!
Unfortunately, her co-teacher shot down the idea saying a four-line poem would not be enough to mark them on a 10 mark scale!

Owing to my sister's interest in alternative education pathways, she keeps getting books and periodicals that can help her challenge her students to think by themselves. I was going through one such fabulously made NCERT 5th Standard Math Text. The book is amazingly different from the dull and drab Math textbooks that I remember using, the sight of which itself would inspire fear and loathing for the subject. For a right-brained individual, these books are nightmares! I have a unnatural fear for mathematics which continues till date even when I'm neck-deep in those books again for an exam. If only I had such a textbook in School!
Unfortunately, even a progressive School like my sister's only uses this book for activities. Each chapter in the book introduces different concepts through a storyline. Practical examples dot the pages.
One particular year, the School decided to scrap all other textbooks and use only these. As a result, traditional maths and science teachers found it very difficult to accept environmental education/history/geography introduced in Mathematics. What does this have to do with Maths? Let them do some serious number crunching.
This was the very same attitude because of which I failed to realize how important math was going to be for everyday life when I was a student. 

I wonder sometimes that even if traditional systems of education change in India (and they are changing, rapidly) how long will it take for educators to adapt to these changes? Many will argue that the logistics of such an education are impossibly high. That teachers have to teach 80 students and generalizing is the only thing that will help. Already, children have begun to refuse participation in studies because they're clever enough to figure out that they're going to get promoted irrespective of their lack of knowledge.
How can this attitude create knowledge-hungry students and not a degree-hungry India that is prevalent today?

I just found this fabulous attempt of the catch 'em young philosophy. Of course, it began in Europe as a part of the back to nature philosophy but what a great attempt to teach Urban children the importance of Nature! It is a small movement now, spreading in heavily-urbanised areas in different parts of the world. I found an article about one such school in New York. 
However every endeavour has critics!
I feel like telling this mother that in India, most children, in rural and semi-urban areas, have to travel for about 3 to 5 kms daily through forests and fields to reach school.(see this) Not to mention the help that they have to provide to their families in collection of water and resources.
Can we think of how to include these activities as a part of the learning process itself, a sort of a-la-Gandhi concept of education?

Think about it!

Faith cometh...

Sometimes life can bring unexpected dilemmas that you just can't solve. All your plans, endeavors and even plotting to make things better don't work. Its especially difficult to understand and make better when loved ones are in the thick of it.

Its hard..this, not knowing! Its hard when you have to put your trust in God, completely and fully. When Jesus said, "Cast your burdens onto me", he must have known how hard it is to just completely "trust".

As a human- being "tangibility" is essentially paramount for me. Being sure about certain things, I take that for granted. I don't know everything but I do find comfort in planning ahead.

But when facilities of planning or controlling what will happen tomorrow are not in your hands, when you know that life as you know it can change completely , it is super difficult to trust.

Its hard, but its not impossible. It hurts but I trust it won't be permanent. And most of all, like always, I know it will be an essential life lesson.

I am not completely at peace, but I can feel, after a long time, a reassuring calm. And that calm is not surreal, for anything it is the most tangible feeling of all.  Its taken its time to come. Maybe it was always waiting right there, like the sun, for an opening in the canopy, where it can push its rays through.

It has slowed me down, shown me that quick-fixes are temporary, and you can only feel calm and peaceful when you pass through a storm safely. I don't know if the storm has subsided or is yet to come whether we're in the middle of it or at the tail-end of it. What I do know is that it is in times like these that He truly shows himself as being the Redeemer.

When I think of the things that you can burden him with, small, big, inconsequential, essential, everything, I wonder how lost I would have been without knowing about that someone who is ready to help you through...everything.

It is a learning process this trust and faith. Renewing it everyday, praying for it to come, I have now begun to  understand all those sermons I've heard over the years...

I've finally begun to discover, he isn't called the "Prince of Peace" for nothing!



 

Stupor

This always happens to me..try as I might, I cannot read a novel without immersing myself in it. I've grown-up with books as friends. But, only a few books engage me enough to completely loose myself in them, even if I read but a few pages before going to sleep or sit day and night with it till I thumb the last page.
That is why I have never believed in reading what the rest of the world is reading. I could never read Harry Potter or The Twilight series, could never finish a Chetan Bhagat novel or even attempt The LOTR series. They just failed to grip me. Its not that I didn't try to read them, I just couldn't go beyond a few pages.  Initially I classified these as bad literature.Now I have realised that its just me, because thousands of people read these books.
Over the years novels have given way to research manuscripts, factual references and a variety of other readable material. I go through a lot of books in a year.
A few friends requested me to try The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. I trust their reading habits well enough to understand that they like many books that I like. So I finally decided to pick it up and began reading it this Thursday.
The book has once again captured my imagination...maybe because I skipped a chance to go to the Sunder bans last year, or because the book writes about things skirting close to my research interest or maybe because the protagonist Piyali thinks like I do on my research trips....I don't know what it is but I am in a sunderban stupor. I researched furiously on the Morichjhanpi incident, I read atleast 6 research papers on the subject in a span of two days. I made assumptions and took sides, but the novel challenged everything to the point of frustration!
This is a fabulous piece of literature, simple yet lyrical. And I can't seem to put it down, nor can I forget the Morichjhanpi incident..........

Unwrapping and Unravelling.......Dimensions to old memories

So I'm back after yet another exhilarating journey and my election day woes are dimming into insignificance and I won't be writing the part 2 of the previous post for some time now.
I traveled again to the place of my dissertation and this time experienced a whole new dimension to it.
This time, it was Bhimashankar, the place; and what meaning people who come to it associate it with.

Mahashivratri is the perfect time to visit this place to understand what it implies to a religion-crazed nation.
It still has hidden dimensions that humanities explains better than social science.
I absorbed this new sensation like a sponge...the midnight pooja at the hands of politicos that prevents pilgrims from catching a glimpse of the object of their faith, the smugness of the religious heads, the mad rush at the doors of the temple, the hashish-fixed sadhus with their never-uncoiling hair.
I also traveled back to a village I had done some field work in, this time to meet the deity that resides in innumerable crevices along the mountain-A pitch-dark cave-home of the goth-god that is permanently covered in ice cold water (mixed with oil from the abhishekam).

Nature has dimensions, layers that need to be unwrapped. It provides endless questions to a oppugning mind.
But some questions are better answered through humanities...the understanding of human nature...
I may not understand humanities and may have several doubts in my social science trained brain, but I am enjoying the unsettling of my well established perceptions....

Aya re aya Matadan-Part 1

I will be voting today. What is disturbing though is that I will not be voting in my own ward since my name features on some other ward-list. This after I've voted twice before.
I don't have an election ID card but as one lady on election duty put it, "at least" my name features on the list.
Yes it does, after filing the form for inclusion of my name thrice!
And now, this!
I will not be giving up on my right. But I will probably have to do the rounds at the collector's office to rectify this mistake!
What I would really like to know is why and on the basis of what are lists shuffled?
My poor friend has apparently been living in the heart of a slum according to her Election I card. This also after repeatedly filing forms with her proper address which does not even feature the name of that particular area.

Democracy? More like Making the demos crazy!