More Creative Strategies
Innovative ideas in any field are always appreciated. I am always trying and working on new ideas and methods of teaching and learning mathematics. It’s a pleasure to share with you that in the July issue of Teacher Plus, I came across a very interesting article “Eventful learning” by Dr. Lalit Kishore. I found the author’s suggestion of integrating daily life events with the learning of the subject unique. In mathematics, the students are not able to visualise the three dimensional mathematics. In this article, a net for making a truncated icosahedron is given which may be used for making a 3 dimensional football.

I really appreciate this idea.

I have a suggestion for Teacher Plus. It will be nice if there is a section for sharing creative strategies for learning mathematics. Through this platform, teachers may share their mathematics activities and projects.

Rashmi Kathuria
PGT (Mathematics)
Kulachi Hansraj Model School
Ashok Vihar, New Delhi.

Spoken English
A kid returning from his school said, “Mom, I will not go to school tomorrow.”
“But why my son?” asked the mother.
“Teacher asked me to stand up on the bench for the present. But she did not give me one and asked me to go home.”
The phrase ‘for the present’ denotes time, i.e., a short while, but the kid having limited vocabulary and understanding interpreted the word ‘present’ as a gift.
Let us look at another example. An illiterate lady enquires about re-charge coupons for her cell phone, “Kya mere phone mein balance dal denge?”
She perhaps heard someone at home saying that there was no balance left so he/she couldn’t make a call. With little understanding of the language, she mistook ‘balance’ as a device to help her operate her phone.
One more example – everyone in India, no matter what their caste, colour, level of education and knowledge, asks for a hot cup of tea and not a cup of hot tea.
Herein lies the need for teachers too to improve not only their spoken English skills but also their written English.

Mohan Lal Mago
Member (Working Group)
Central Institute for Vocational Educator (NCERT)
132-A, Pocket-I
Mayur Vihar-I, Delhi 110091

The teaching and learning of Set Theory can be made interesting using simple yet effective methods. The following exercises will help children learn and enjoy the concept of Set Theory.

What you need: A board with figures, as shown in Figure 1. The drawing can either be black and white or colour. This is just one example; you can use as many different patterns as you wish based on how difficult or simple you want the game to be.

What is a Set?
A set is a well-defined collection of objects. Individual objects in a set are called elements or members of the set.

Shailendra Gupta is Principal, Eklavya Institute of Teacher Education, Ahmedabad. He can be reached at shailendarg@icenet.net.

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Kangaroo Words

Every schoolchild knows that kangaroos carry their babies in their pouches. Fewer people know about kangaroo words, which carry their own baby words with the same meanings.

For example, the kangaroo word illuminated contains the synonym lit among its letters. Similarly exists hides the word is and deceased includes dead.

Try to find synonyms in the following words:
1. Amicable
2. Encourage
3. Recline
4. Instructor
5. Observe

Can you find two synonyms inside these kangaroo words?
1. Alone
2. Container
3. Expurgated

Three-in-One

Words are sometimes composed of other words. The word dustbin consists of dust plus bin. To reverse the process, which word can be made out of the letters in the three words moor, root, and tow? The answer (or at least, one answer) is tomorrow. In the puzzles below, try to find eight-letter words which can be made from the letters of the sets of three words.

Example: Soon, sun, toil.
Answer: Solution.
1. Riot, rite, tone.
2. Agent, gnat, stage.
3. Filth, hot, tool.
4. Lids, new, rind.
5. Quit, tone, unit.

Doublets

Doublets or Word Morph is a game which was invented by Lewis Carroll. The objective of the game is to go from one word to another in a particular number of moves. As an example, the word ‘head’ may be changed into ‘tail’ by interposing the words ‘heal, teal, tell, tall.’ Thus Carroll changed ‘head’ into ‘tail’ in five moves:
HEAD, HEAL, TEAL, TELL, TALL, TAIL

Try to make the following transformations in the specified number of moves.
1. Change CAT into DOG in three moves.
2. Change SICK into WELL in four moves.
3. Change HARD into EASY in five moves.
4. Change RICH into POOR in six moves.
5. Change BREAD into TOAST in seven moves.

Homonyms
The English language has many pairs of words that sound the same but are spelt differently. They are called homonyms or sometimes homophones.

Identify the pairs of homonyms from the following clues.

Example: One word means a place for keeping aircraft; the other word means a shaped piece of wood, metal, etc., on which you can hang clothes.
Answer: Hangar/hanger.

1. One word means simple; the other means an aircraft.
2. One word means expected; the other word means condensed vapour.
3. One word means to hit; the other is a vegetable.
4. One word is a day; the other is a dessert.
5. One word means a woolly South American animal; the other means a Buddhist monk in Tibet or Mongolia.

Anagram
An anagram, says the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is ‘a word or phrase formed by transposing the letters of another word or phrase’. Can you transpose these words or phrases to make new words or phrases?

Example: Rearrange the letters of the word ‘rail’ to make a dishonest person.
Answer: Liar.

1. Rearrange ‘brush’ to make a kind of bush.
2. Rearrange ‘lemon’ to make something else to eat.
3. What do you have to be if you want to ‘listen’?
4. In two words, where can you find a ‘schoolmaster’?
5. Which part of the body is a ten-letter word in which the last five letters are an anagram of the first five letters?

Time and again, we had indulged in introspection, repeatedly turning over numerous questions in our minds about education, about systems that put shackles on each of us, about the direction in which we were moving. A feeling of discontent and frustration was obvious. We were trying to change teaching and learning to make it meaningful and joyful, but were we impacting anything at all?

How were we going to realise the vision of becoming a school system that was child-centric with a challenging and meaningful curriculum that nurtured holistic development? Thus began our soul searching – for answers, ideas, strategies. We then set out to undertake a school audit by a professional external agency – The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore. It became very clear that any school development programme would need to address the school as a whole without isolating either the curriculum, teaching, learning, assessment, staff management or policies.
It had to encompass

• Evolving a shared vision.
• Teacher and Leadership Development.
• Planning a curriculum which would focus on objectives, high order thinking skills, and language development.
• Transforming teacher learning strategies from being teacher centric to being student centric.
• Improving assessment practices.
• Evolving behaviour expectations.
• Building and enhancing learning spaces.

With the support of WATIS, we embarked on a training programme conducted by The Teacher Foundation. Since training all our teachers at once was going to be a financial strain, we sent our teachers in batches over three years.

In 2004 our efforts received a boost when we accepted the offer to sign up for the Whole School Transformation Program supported by WATIS. The project, spread over two years, had weekly and long duration workshops to address specific issues.

Many of us failed to understand why we were doing this. After all we were a reputed and popular school, securing good results in public exams. It took us time to convince our teachers, but there is always the possibility that all may never be convinced.

However, sustained workshops got us interacting, sharing and learning. Gradually teachers realised the importance of resources like reference worksheets, organisers, books, CDs, teaching aids, etc. The teachers began sharing their experiences, both good and bad. As they tried to weave in higher order thinking skills, the curriculum got more challenging, and they felt the need for more resources, ideas, etc. The wall had finally been broken… our learning had begun.

An in-house Teacher Resource Centre (TRC) came into being providing a learning space for teachers, underlying the importance of ongoing learning in the school community. It also meant networking with neighbourhood schools and sharing resources, ideas, and concerns.

In-house workshops, discussions, dialogues, organising educational film shows, and melas that encourage teachers to collaborate and share are some of the things one can expect of a TRC.

At the A V Educational Society, TRC members are entitled to 5-10 membership cards. Members can use the Internet, the books, the CDs, etc., and can attend workshops/programmes on a bi-monthly basis.

The AVTRC will organise regular programmes every third Saturday of the month for their teachers.

The AVTRC was inaugurated on November 3, 2007. Schools or teachers interested in participating in or becoming the members of the AVTRC can contact
Ms. Sandhya Siddharth at sundhya@yahoo.com.

The word ‘education’ conjures up many images – of children earnestly working in school, poring over their books, preparing for the future. The current notion of education as preparation for the future is relatively recent, a product of modern western society. Preparation for the future implies more productivity, more expertise, more leisure, so that the future is more secure. In earlier times, however, education had different emphases – learning, mainly religious in nature; the mastering of various skills, often passed on from one generation to the next in order to fulfill a role in society. Religious learning laid a foundation for the student to become a better human being – for example, the Buddhist ideal of striving towards becoming a bodhisatva, who released all sentient beings from suffering, the Muslim notion of piety, and obedience to God and the prophet, the Hindu notion of Brahman, a state of transcendence of the material world.

One of the earliest Indian religious thinkers of the 20^th century who recognised the need for a shift in consciousness towards higher ideals was Aurobindo. His vision for education was based on that of the ancient Indian sages – that behind the apparent separation of objects and phenomena in the world, there is an underlying unity which may be called the Self of all things, or, the Reality of a Being of all things. It is possible for anyone to “remove (the) veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all.” (Aurobindo to himself, Vol.26, p.35). Aurobindo also wrote of the principles of ‘supramental Yoga’, that is, a practice of transcending the ordinary workings of the mind, which is based on instincts such as greed, passion, desire and attachment; leading to a constant pursuit of greater beauty, harmony, power and knowledge.

These principles are at the core of Aurobindo’s religious teachings. He perceived a renaissance of India based on the application of these principles, and the healing, through the education of young people, of what he called a ‘national wound’ inflicted by colonialism. The brutal and sometimes inane principles of the then British educational system were (and still are) being carried out in India even after independence – capital punishment, cramming for examinations, the rigid authoritarianism of teachers. He saw these as deeply destructive of curiosity and learning and felt the need for a complete change in the way education was approached – a freeing of the minds of Indians into an appreciation of their own rich cultural past.

Often, Aurobindo rewrote received principles of education. If his principles were to be applied in schools today, much would have to be changed. The teacher, rather than being authoritarian, has to play the unobtrusive role of guiding the pupil gently and easily without the rigid imposition of structures such as constant testing and evaluation. A school is usually regarded as a place a child goes to in order to learn from the teacher and from books. Specially talented children are usually recognised by teachers through competitions. However, Aurobindo saw that every child has a combination of a variety of talents: an instinct for words, a dramatic faculty, an interest in and an imagination for history. Besides, children love interesting narratives, and “Every child is an enquirer, investigator, analyser and merciless anatomist…. Every child has an insatiable intellectual curiosity and turn for metaphysical enquiry” (Aurobindo and the Mother, p.34, p.35).

Slowly, by stimulating these talents and faculties, a child may be drawn into understanding herself and the world. A child’s talents cannot be nurtured or cultivated unless there is leisure and space for exploration. The emphasis on slowness is compelling. Slowness is usually considered an index of a lazy mind, which is incapable of grasping concepts completely. However, a child who shows no evidence of grasping a concept immediately after it has been taught may, in fact, be assimilating it in her own unique way, playing with the concepts and images in her mind, turning them over and over so as to find it meaningful.

Even if teachers are not able to make too many radical changes in the classroom, they could make some changes in their perspectives. Teaching and learning need not be experienced as rigid processes that are not a source of pleasure, or as a road leading to a future which never seems to arrive (the ideal of endless progress). Aurobindo’s teachings and work in education show us that modern education need not exclude what it means to strive towards the higher ideals of being human. This, after all, is what education has meant through the ages.

Deepa Onkar has been a teacher at CFL, Bangalore, and is an editor based in Chennai. She can be reached at donks71@yahoo.co.uk .

The philosophy of peace education is easier to preach than practice. With the contemporary world strife-torn in various ways and words like peace and spirituality severely challenged, it is astonishing that an orientation to the idea of peace in schools is a buzzword. Terms like peace and spirituality sound, to a sceptical mind, more like a formulaic premise of a new industry rather than a genuine effort to bring about any change. It is, of course, a fallout of the burgeoning impact of the new sectors of business and consumerism where peace seems to be packaged and commodified. Moreover, peace is often projected against conflict, and therefore, means conflict-resolution. No wonder, in policy statements, the idea of peace makes sense only when there is a resolvable conflict.

Amid such growing perceptions that undermine the magnitude of the phenomenon called peace, some of us in schools experience the need to rework on the idea of peace in order to nurture a new generation of peace citizens. Thus, to attempt to orient children to peace we must recognise the aspects of young life. Peace can be perceived in the simplest acts of life like watching birds in the morning, enjoying the sunset every evening, listening to the winds, smelling the earth when it rains, and smiling. All these acts that forge an affinity between the inner self and the external environment signify peace. Perhaps this was what Aurobindo meant when he envisaged education as enabling learners to find harmony between the spiritual interior and the material exterior. If peace can be underlined as taking pride in one’s own identity, it also includes the act of appreciating others’ identity too. Peace involves understanding oneself, understanding the relation between self and others, and sensibility toward one’s thoughts and actions of everyday life. Does peace education in schools take into account the comprehensive structure of peace? These considerations led me to observe and document the activities which refer to peace education in the school I teach, Bluebells in Delhi, where an elaborate curriculum of life-skills is being pursued to provide learners with an orientation to the idea of peace.

The agenda and action
The structure in this case is ambitiously designed to produce young ambassadors of peace by providing students with training in life-skills on the one hand, and inspiring them for possible action in their own capacity on the other. Thus, the whole pedagogy of peace education is doubly charged as it consists of cognition and action as two cardinal co-ordinates. Inother words, while children acquire knowledge of tools, techniques and methods of understanding themselves and their environs better, they are also taken to the various areas of actions. In the list of life-skills, in agreement with UNICEF, the school includes communication and interpersonal skills, decision-making and problem solving skills, and coping and self-management skills.

To begin with, the school has various clubs under the ‘Socially Useful and Productive Work’ (SUPW) programme. Each club offers a syllabus-based course and an evaluation at the end of the year. Dramatics, photography, pottery, dance, music and public speaking are the areas wherein corresponding skills are taught. Certain other clubs, such as the Palestine club, Right to information club, Debating club, etc., are geared to expose the learners to areas of conflict and enable them to frame and articulate their concerns. These are more to make the change-makers cognitively prepared. Various sessions by these clubs enable learners to peep within and chisel themselves into shape.

This is explicitly revealed in the sessions of the Dramatics club, conducted by Dilip Shanker, a noted theatre personality. In these sessions, Dilip manoeuvers the participants using tools of meditation, whereby imagination helps in self-discovery. In this exercise, children bring about what Dilip describes as a union between the subjective and the objective realities to realise the wholeness of the individual personality. The intuitive understanding of every kind of emotion, pertaining to animate and inanimate bodies, eventually is converted into enacting various ideas. The whole idea is to let the learners know that acting on stage and action in real life are alike insofar as both pre-suppose the apt motif, relevant emotions, and understanding of the self and the other, the ability to forge cooperation with others and so on. Besides, by enacting interpersonal situations, the participants realise how the execution of certain traits, features, emotions and ideas could be disastrous for not only the community but also the individual self. Hence, children learn to select the right ideas and emotions in real life settings in order to co-exist even with differences.

Other clubs also enhance skill-based abilities and expression of the same diverse situations. Photography, dance, debating are the fields where children learn not only the tools of expressions but also the art of observing, formulating ideas, and actually resisting and articulating resistance to undesirable aspects of human living.

In addition to routine club-activities, the school also invites experts from various non-governmental organisations, during every academic year, to conduct workshops on several issues pertaining to life-skills which eventually aim at understanding and actualising peace. A glance at a few workshops illustrates the point. Pravah, an NGO working with schools and colleges, has executed a series of sessions with children, which are put together in an elaborate life-skills curriculum titled ‘Making Changemakers’. Summarily, the curriculum envisages that the participants of the session will learn about themselves and their surroundings. Through activities such as ‘Kabir making’, a participant was able to reckon with personal attributes, whims and volitions, and possibilities and limitations. On the flip side, the ‘other’ to the self was discovered to be essentially similar although materially different from the self of every participant.

In yet another programme ‘Footprint’, devised by Child Relief and You (CRY), the school anticipated children’s growth from ‘Me’ to ‘We’. The school agrees with the ideology of shaping each individual child in such a way that an inspiration to bring about a confluence with the whole of humanity could emerge. Experts from CRY, pursuing the module of ‘Footprints’, manoeuvered participating children toward the aforementioned end. Convinced of the intent of the sessions and rejoicing in the content of the curriculum, children began to look at the environs where they lead their everyday lives differently. They genuinely began to empathise with ‘others’ irrespective of socio-economic and socio-cultural differences. A constructive relationship among children from diverse backgrounds was an apparent result of the process. According to the convener of all such sessions in school, Bhawna Bhasin, the teacher in charge of social work in theschool, the school has adopted the methods encapsulated in the ‘Footprints’ module, and now it is carried on by the sensitised teachers of the school.

Modicare Foundation has been conducting workshops on understanding physical changes, sexuality, and adaptation to the environment, in addition to building and sustaining interpersonal relationships. Workshops by the students of St. Stephen’s College, called ‘The Youth Parliament’, have also been consistently held. Through simple aids such as charts and discourse, their workshops endeavour to inculcate ideas pertaining to citizenship.

A course called ‘community service’ requires children to visit communities residing in slums and offer help. Children trained in the technique of social work spend time with people listening to them and suggesting appropriate measures or promising to act on their behalf, and teaching the children and interested adults.

Incidentally, Bhawna edits an annual magazine for the school titled ‘Nurturing’ which declares its intention in the punch line at the top of the magazine: ‘Peace begins at Home’. Evidently, the peace-programme the school pursues does not leave out the parents. It appeals to parents to be partners in grooming young ambassadors of peace for the future. Perhaps this is why parents readily consent to the school’s plan of sending children into the outside world to execute the tools, methods and insights they have acquired in the school. The Tehelka Foundation and the school collaborated to send well-trained and determined children to various villages of Maharashtra, Rajsthan, Orissa and Karnataka to interact with the villagers and understand the people’s struggles through the host NGOs at the destination.

Peace education is indeed a grand idea to work on in a school. There are a few problems, however, that need to be addressed if a school is determined to produce a generation of peace citizens. First, the structure of education is replete with an unsaid hierarchy. At the top it has mainstream teaching and learning meant for passing exams under the ambit of formaleducation. This is where most of the lessons that children learn in the workshops are contradicted. The idea of peace is not evenly distributed in the structure of education. Second, the vision, insights and tools and techniques children learn are not always appreciated by the outside world. And last but not the least, workshops by experts may be too regimented and rationalised in terms of the means and the end to take into consideration the meaningful irrationality of the learners.

If peace education is to have the necessary impact, it is imperative to recall Prof. Krishna Kumar. “The unpredictable outcomes of learning are far more important than the ones we can predict and plan for. This is so because the crisis caused by violence and conflict in the human world is far deeper and vast than any rational plan can resolve. Only miracles can, if we let them happen, as they do quite often, eventlessly.”* Hopefully, schools pursuing peace education will evolve a pedagogic structure that can greet miraculous developments of the learners.

*‘Teaching peace’, Teacher Plus, Jan-Feb. 2007. Vol.V, No.1, page:14

Dev N Pathak is on the faculty, Department of Social Science, Bluebells School, New Delhi. He can be reached at dev.pathak1@gmail.com.

Immediately, attention is drawn to all four major areas of why there is a regional (and then, by inference, a worldwide) variety in clothing. This is because there are differences in:

• purposes behind wearing clothes.
• the materials available for making clothes.
• ways of making clothes.
• clothing customs.

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We’ve all been brought up on a staple diet of (silent) reading and listening in school. As long as students don’t speak up, teachers are grateful. In crowded classes, one can’t interact with students, so any student speaking up becomes ‘a disturbance’. Speaking skills in most educational institutions take a backseat, with the result that speaking has become a problem today and companies are forced to spend lavishly on getting their employees to speak the right way – by sounding interested, intelligent and intelligible.

What’s the problem?
Speaking involves grammar and vocabulary, and most importantly, the ability to be understood by the listener. Therefore, it is a combination of volume and clarity, which we call enunciation. Essentially, it means the ability to speak clearly without mumbling and by pronouncing each syllable in the right way so that the listener does not have to be constantly saying, “Pardon me?” or “Could you say that again, please?”

Manaswini Sridhar is a teacher educator and language trainer based in Chennai. She can be reached at manaswinisridhar@gmail.com.

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English is a language that has never shied away from borrowing words from other languages. While our politicians with their tunnel vision have attempted to keep our languages pure – since they find it impossible to keep themselves or the members of their party ‘pure’ – English continues to be on overdrive when it comes to borrowing. Perhaps what is interesting is that many of the borrowed words have become such an integral part of the language that one forgets that the words are not English. Take for example, the word ‘bank’, a word that we use or hear being used almost every day. Did you know that it is not an English word and that its origins can be traced back to the Italian word ‘banca’? Any idea what the word ‘banca’ means? Well, let me give you a hint. If you went to school in the 1960s like I did, you probably sat on one all day. If your grey cells concluded that ‘banca’ is the Italian word for ‘bench’, then you were bang on. Good on you!

The question that arises is what is the connection between the humble bench and the modern bank? How did the bench give rise to the concept of a bank? Well, believe it or not, the first ‘banks’ were the ‘bancas’ or the benches. Several centuries ago, money lenders used to transact business sitting on a bench. The ‘banca’ was kept in a public place – usually in the courtyard of a temple – and it became the moneylender’s office. As long as this individual carried out his business in what was perceived to be a fair manner, then there was no problem. But if the clients believed that a banker was cheating them, they drove him out of business by ensuring that he didn’t have an office to work out of. How did they achieve this? The angry clients broke the moneylender’s ‘banca’. It is from this simple act of destroying a bench that we get the word ‘bankrupt’. ‘Rupt’ means ‘break’; the original meaning of ‘bankrupt’ therefore was ‘broken bench’. Since the poor man didn’t have an office to carry out his business from, he often went bankrupt. Nowadays when we are strapped for cash, we say, ‘I’m broke’. What you mean is that you are like the money lender whose bench has been broken!

Parents often encourage their children to save money. In order to inculcate this habit in them and to make the activity fun, they gift them a ‘piggy bank’. When you think about it, the pig is a strange choice for getting youngsters to hoard money. This noble animal which Lord Emsworth loved to spend time with is not renowned for its ability to plan for the future. Squirrels and foxes, yes, they store food for future use. They are the well-known ‘savers’ in the animal kingdom. The pig, on the other hand, is a glutton; it lives for the moment. It consumes everything that lies in its path and when its belly is full, the animal lets out a satisfied grunt and moves on. It makes no attempt to hide or store food for future use. So why do we use this animal to get our children to save? Doesn’t it make more sense to have a squirrel bank or a fox bank? Why did the English pick the pig?

Believe it or not, the ‘pig’ in ‘piggy bank’ has nothing to do with the animal; it refers to the material used in the Middle Ages to make pots and pans. During the 15th century, metal was very expensive and seldom used for making utensils. Most dishes around this time were made of clay called ‘pygg’. Whenever a housewife managed to save some money, she used to store it in ‘pygg jars’ which she called ‘pygg bank’ – meaning ‘clay bank’. With the passage of time, the spelling of the clay material changed from ‘pygg’ to ‘pig’. This took place in the 18^th century, and by the time the 19^th century came along people had more or less forgotten that the ‘pig’ in ‘pig jar’ or ‘pig bank’ referred to the clay and not the animal. So much so that when potters were asked to make ‘piggy banks’, they produced them in the shape of a pig! The animal shaped bank became an instant hit with the children. Nowadays, we don’t find too many piggy banks made of clay. Porcelain and ceramic are the order of the day.

S Upendran teaches at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. He can be reached at supendran@gmail.com.

Measuring and rewarding the right kind of performance forms the cornerstone of any well functioning system of incentives. Public education in India, both primary and higher education, is marked by a complete absence of performance-based incentives for teachers. Consequently, the system is marked by fixed tenures, uniform emoluments across grades and promotions that are a function of experience and accumulated graduate degrees rather than performance.

Studies have highlighted the weak link between the experience and training of teachers (as indicated by traditional teacher training certification) and pupil achievement. Pupil achievement has been found to be linked most strongly with a teacher’s performance, which in turn is linked to her/his cognitive skills and motivation. However, the salary scales of teachers in India’s 900, 000 government schools incorporate no link to a teacher’s job performance.

The author is a student of public policy at Duke University. She can be reached at parulsharmax@yahoo.com.

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