The World Cup debacle of the Indian cricket team in March 2007 led to, among other things, media outrage about the commitment of the players involved. The Indian batting, otherwise revered, was deemed brittle and good only against poorer oppositions. Anyone who follows cricket will have noticed the statistical information that comes up as part of the analysis of the game. Thinking about teaching math, or even statistics, to children interested in sport is not a novel idea. But newer statistical analysis within sport can actually help expound mathematical concepts, usually rendered in a soporific garb.

Let us look at an example. The mean in a set of scores can be explained using the scores of a batsman. Take the recent debate about Virender Sehwag’s wretched batting form. Consider his scores in the first half 2007. They are as follows: 9, Did Not Bat (DNB), 8, 1, 10, 9, 17, 65, 0, 18, 11, 19, 12, 46, 2, 114, 48. The mean, or the batting average of Sehwag’s scores can be calculated by dividing the total number of runs garnered in all innings by the number of completed innings (as indicated by the scores, he did not bat for one innings, and hence the total number of innings ought to be 16). His average or mean score is 24.31.

Sehwag’s scores can teach us a few more things about statistics. By themselves, the scores don’t mean much, therefore, let us create some categories that will make his scores a little more clear to the mathematical mind. Suppose we divide the runs scored in the 17 innings into the following categories.

Amit Upadhyay is a doctoral candidate with the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

Some people think that Mathematics is meant for those who have great mental ability. However, with a decade and a half of teaching math behind me, I beg to differ. There is, no doubt, a fear in many students about learning this subject; this, I found, was due to the traditional “chalk and talk” methodology of teaching mathematics, which is not sufficient to achieve the goals of teaching/learning of mathematics. Using this method by itself can create a gap between the student and the learning of the subject. There is a dire need to change our teaching/learning approaches if we want to help students who are “not able to do mathematics” up to the expected level.

As a teacher, I am always seeking new strategies to teach/learn mathematics. In this connection, I attended a workshop organised by CII Shiksha at one of the DAV schools in Delhi, to facilitate the integration of information and communication technology in education. The participants were introduced to the dynamic world of e-learning, and given a demonstration on using Moodle, an open-source software, in education. We were also given some pre-developed subject content that we could use straightaway, as well as basic training on how to create our own content.

Rashmi Kathuria is a P.G.T. (Mathematics) and teaches at the Kulachi Hansraj Model School, New Delhi. She can be reached at mathclass_khms@yahoo.co.in

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

In 1665, the story goes,that Sir Isaac Newton,after seeing an apple fall, sought the reason and came to the conclusion that the natural force of attraction exerted by the earth upon objects at or near its surface tends to draw them towards its centre. The force of gravity is equal to Gm1m2/r2 where m1 and m2 denote the masses of the earth and the object and r is the distance between the centre of the earth and the object and G a constant called the constant of gravitation. The value of G has been found to be 6.673 x 10 -11 which is equal to 0.00000000006673. This implies that if the object is further away from the centre of the earth, the force of gravity on it is less than on objects which are closer to the centre of the earth.

Gravitation is a natural phenomenon by which objects attract each other. It is gravity which keeps the earth and other heavenly objects in their orbit. We take it for granted that it is easier to walk down a slope than up a hill and that one can drive a car down a slope by remaining in neutral gear. The idea that any object will fall down rather than go up is what we are usually accustomed to, but an experience I had on a recent visit to the United States, went against all these notions of gravity.

Bedford is a small town in the state of Pennsylvania in the US, about 50 miles east of Philadelphia. Driving in a wooded area, we stopped our car at the foot of a hill. When we put the car in neutral gear and took the foot off the accelerator we found the car rolling up the hill. How could we be going up looked around but there was no one. We returned to the town and asked people about this phenomenon and were told that this was a speciality of the place and many tourists came here to experience this phenomenon of gravity being defied.

We learnt that there were several places where one can encounter this kind of a phenomenon. In the USA alone there are about 30 to 40 such places. In Gansu province in China, there is a slope of 200 ft at an angle of 15 degrees where one can see a river running up the hill. There is also the famous Oregon vortex in USA where, in a circular spot about 165 ft in diameter, people appear to be shrinking as they walk towards you. The only spot in India where one can experience this phenomenon is in Ladakh.

Why does this happen? People living near the hill we visited tell a strange story. Years ago, when a school bus going up the hill suddenly stopped the children got down to push it up. But, the bus began to roll down and in the process some students were crushed and killed. The people believe that it is the ghosts of these children that push the vehicles up the hill! Nice story if one wants to believe in ghosts, magic and miracles. But is there a scientific explanation?

Yes. The answer – optical illusion. Experiments were performed to understand the phenomenon. The altitudes at the bottom and summit of one such hill were 1582 and 1569 ft., which implies that the hill actually has a downward slope. What is actually a downward slope appears to be uphill due to an optical illusion. A horizon that is either completely or mostly obstructed makes it difficult to judge the angle of the slope. Our sense of balance is completely overruled by the nature of the surroundings and what is actually a slight downhill looks like an uphill. Nature working its magic!
(Contributed by M V Pattabhiraman)

Schools are, or they ought to be, dynamic, changing organisations if they are to be effective in educating our children. A school which does not think about how to develop, how to constantly grow, is a dead organisation which cannot produce thinking minds. Many schools recognise this truth. The problem is that thinking about what needs to be changed and how, is a detailed, time-consuming process requiring a fresh look and objective perspective on what needs to be done. People within the school generally have neither the time nor the objectivity to make a holistic assessment of their own organisation. So what can a school do, if it wants to create a blueprint for change? It was in answer to this that we at Learn Today developed a school audit framework. Learn Today is the learning division of the India Today group, working on school development, setting up new schools, teacher training, curriculum development and educational advocacy.

The underlying philosophy of the Learn Today audit is a combination of standardised benchmarks and the individual mission of a school. The audit measurements are shaped by an individual school’s own philosophy and objectives and are directly related to the needs and aims of a specific school. Obviously the philosophy of a large private school is different to a semi-urban or rural school which is in turn different to a special needs school.

Shalini Advani is Director, Education at ULearn Today, New Delhi. She can be reached at sadvani@ulearntoday.com

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

Photo : CFL, Bangalore

Remember that mathematical theorem that you couldn’t understand for the longest time? Or English grammar exercises that gave you a hard time with prepositions or active and passive voice? I, for one, never understood the need to convert because it was always so confusing. Anyway, the classroom is a good place to begin our confusions but we all tend to resolve them outside it, with help from others. The idea of supplementary tuition is some sort of an expected routine where an older cousin (it is presumed that older means without confusions) comes to the rescue with his or her academic reputation firmly established in the family.

I remember my older cousins, who were not necessarily brighter but just a few standards ahead of me in school. Their grades had sort of granted them role-model status and so I was made to look up to them and seek their help whenever the need arose. And it did arise with a frequency whose statistical manifestation would be… well, pardon my lack of expertise for that’s precisely why I depended on my cousins.

There were two of them, my paternal uncle’s son Rajiv and my maternal aunt’s niece Veena. While Rajiv was battling his second board examination, Veena was all set to write her first. That was 1994, the year I learnt that reading books carefully and paying attention in class could be a simple and elegant solution to being subjected to the boasting and bullying of older cousins.

Now set theory in mathematics and the active-passive see-saw in English were concepts I thought were invented by someone really sadistic, not necessarily the same person though. And where my performance in one needed more ‘active’ attention, the other threw me into a state of perpetual passivity, opening the door to a zone of greater confusion. On my mother’s suggestion, I turned to Rajiv for set theory and Veena for grammar lessons. After my first session with them, I wanted to switch subjects between them to see if they would do any better. But the idea was shot down without further scope for a resuggestion.

In only a few sessions with Rajiv, I had mixed up subsets and supersets even more inextricably than before. And though the Venn diagram circles intersected at brighter points in my brain, the regions within them blanked out completely. Veena on the other hand, went from active to passive and back just fine but I figured her (mis)understanding of tense lent her facial expression a pedagogic uncertainty that made my active-passive journey less hyphenated than before. In all honesty, they did try very hard to make me understand but I guess I have always been a special child.

So, there are several morals to this story. While active-passive has been of some use to me, I have discarded all memories of set theory from my nostalgia. Also, older cousins don’t necessarily know more than you because for all you know, they sought help from a set of equally (in)competent older cousins and the chain probably stretches back in time to when there was no set theory or English grammar.

Welcome to my drawing room cum loo? Two rooms that are an integral part of every house/flat in India are the ‘drawing room’ and the ‘bathroom’ – sometimes, referred to as the ‘loo’. No matter how big or small an individual’s ‘residence’ is, these two rooms are a permanent fixture. The importance of the bathroom is understandable, but does one really need a ‘drawing room’? We Indians seem to think so because no house is ever complete without one. It is not uncommon for the proud owner of a new flat to say, ‘This is our drawingcum-dining room’? When you hear such a comment, how often have you been tempted to ask, ‘Really? I know for a fact you don’t draw, so why the heck do you need a drawing room?’ Quite often, I imagine. Unfortunately, instead of yielding to temptation by popping the question, we merely choose to bottle up the imp inside us.

Coming to the matter at hand, have you ever wondered why a house requires a drawing room? After all, how many of us actually draw? Even among those that do, how many use the so-called ‘drawing room’ for this purpose? Hardly any, I should think. What then is the function of this room? It is generally used when we entertain guests. If that is the case, why do we call it a ‘drawing room’? To understand this, we need to go back in time to 16th century Europe.

During the times of Shakespeare, when guests were invited for dinner, they were served their meal in the ‘dining room’. Men and women sat around a table, ate together, and made polite conversation. Once dinner was over, husbands and wives went separate ways. The men would either remain at the dining table or retire to the ‘smoking’ room. Here they would light up their cigars, drink something strong, and entertain one another by telling dirty jokes – something which etiquette prevented them from doing in the presence of ladies.

The ladies, on the other hand, went to another room where they could gossip; this room that they retired to was called the ‘withdrawing room’. They withdrew into this room after dinner. With the passage of time, ‘withdrawing room’ was reduced to ‘drawing room’.

While we are able to see the connection between a ‘withdrawing room’ and a ‘drawing room’, none seems to exist between a ‘bathroom’ and ‘loo’. To make the connection, we need to go back to Europe once again to a time when indoor plumbing was nonexistent. In India, during the good old days, when someone had to answer the call of nature, all he did was to fill his ‘lota’ and walk in the direction of the nearest field. Unfortunately, people in Europe couldn’t do this for two reasons: the cities were too crowded, and the cold weather made it impossible for them to saunter off into the fields to do the needful.

So what did Europeans do when they had to go? Instead of taking a walk, they stayed inside the house and deposited the contents into a big pot called the ‘chamber pot’. Once the pot was full and the rich smell of the unmentionables permeated the house, what did they do? You would expect them to dig a hole somewhere nearby and bury the contents in it. But this is not what the Europeans did. This race, which now gives us lectures on cleanliness and hygiene, used to throw the waste material out the window. Even people living in big cities like Paris and London sent human waste flying out the window. As a warning to those unfortunate pedestrians who were walking under the window or somewhere nearby, the person emptying the chamber pot shouted, ‘gardez l’eau’ – meaning ‘beware of the water’/ ‘guard against the water’. As soon as the people heard this, they beat a hasty retreat. If they didn’t, they got a pot full of… you know what! Later the warning was reduced to ‘l’eau’ meaning ‘water’. When indoor plumbing became a permanent fixture, the bathroom began to be called ‘l’eau’. Later, it changed to ‘loo’.

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

In the September issue of Teacher Plus, in his article entitled ‘Reclaiming Shiksha’, the author introduced Ivan Illich’s idea of deschooling and discussed replacing school-based education with an open community based system that is child led rather than simply child centred. He urges us to ask ‘disturbing’ questions that take us beyond ‘business as usual’ in terms of education.

Is it really possible for us in India?
Contrary to popular misconception, unschooling and deschooling are not from the West or only for the West. We need to understand that Shiksha and Education are not the same. They come from totally different historical, philosophical, spiritual and epistemological roots. We need to reclaim the meaning of shiksha and forms like the guru-shishyaparampara. Shiksha is more closely rooted in selforganised and experiential forms of learning. Real gurus were never self-proclaimed/state-imposed instructors, nor did they seek to impose a uniform standardised syllabus on those who learned with them. For us in the subcontinent, shiksha grows from concept-practices such as in satya, swadhyaya, samvaad, ahimsa, anekantavad, yoga, sahayog, lok vidya, shram, vinumvrata, kshama, etc. There are many powerful stories of self-learners throughout history. Eklavya being one of the most famous ones. However, these heroes have been sadly maligned by the guardians of the Institutional Faith. Some of the initial experiments with Nai Taleem and Shantiniketan also tried to embody these principles but somewhere along the way, they also got corrupted in the framework of institutionalised education…

In fact, I truly believe that it is much easier for us to make this connection than for those in the West, because we still have so many living learning spaces. In villages and even in most towns and cities, you can still find opportunities for apprenticeship learning, you can easily get to a forest, you can experience life in a joint family (full of rich relationships of all ages). We luckily do not have to go to a zoo to see animals; we can interact with them on the roads and in the fields. One can learn yoga without going to a yoga center. Everywhere, you can find a million forms of kabaad (so-called waste) to jugaad with, to make something useful, beautiful and durable. The best part about these opportunities in India is that most have not yet been commodified. One quite fortunately does not have to pay a lot of money to access them.

Indigenous resources
We urgently need to look at our learning assets outside of the framework of schooling. This exercise has not been seriously undertaken in the last 50 years. Gandhi had some inkling of it but the work was abandoned post 1947. If and when we undertake this, we will soon begin to realise that India is not a ‘poor’ or ‘backward’ country in terms of learning resources. We need to honestly re-evaluate what is ‘forward’ and what is ‘backward’ in India. For example, I recently met a woman from Canada who was sharing with me an educational programme that she had started in schools to teach children emotional empathy and sensitivity. For a number of reasons, there are very few opportunities for children in Canada to touch and hold small babies. Millions of dollars were being spent to bring small babies into the classroom so that middle school children could interact with them for a few hours a week. I felt we were quite fortunate that children in India are able to naturally witness birth as well as death. I pray for the day when we in the Global South will begin to understand that we are in many ways much better off than our heavily institutionalized Western counterparts.

The real threats to these vibrant indigenous learning resources are the institutional viruses that pose as roses: like the campaigns against child labour and for compulsory/coercive education. While I agree that hazardous labour should be outlawed for men, women and children, I do not feel that all labour is bad or should be banned from our children’s lives. Indeed, one of the leading reasons behind the degradation of human health today comes from the lack of authentic physical work and labour in our lives. Such productive labour kept us alive and thriving for generations, why do we want to banish it from our lives? It is important to re-look at the link between using our hands/body, meaningful work and the growth of our mind, spirit and emotional well-being.

Where is the hope?
For the last nine years, I have been working with people around the world to respond to the question, “If not the culture of schooling, then what?” What’s sprung up are several networks. One is the Learning Societies Network1 where we have invited a number of unusual partners (farmers, artists, artisans, activists, filmmakers, healers, storytellers, local businessmen, children, youth, parents, grandparents, illiterates, spiritualists, etc.) to explore what kind of learning and living we want in our society. We ask people who are interested to start by sharing their town experiences and experiments with learning in different ways in their own lives. The idea behind the Learning Societies Network is to demystify and break the monopoly of education experts and professionals over discussions concerning human learning. We do not believe that educators alone can envision and make the deeper changes in education that are necessary for the 21st century. People with diverse worldviews who are leading/supporting real-world experiments across many different domains need to be in the discussion. Today, friends in fields as varied as global climate change, community media, organic farming, free software movement, etc., are raising the kinds of profound questions about life that can eventually shake the foundations of the education system. Are we willing to listen?

Just as natural farmers are redefining the field of agriculture, and self-healers are redefining the field of medicine, so are many youth determining their own paths of learning as more than 90 per cent of youth in India do not attend college. These pathbreakers are however, at the same time nurtured by and nurturing the growth of a large and vibrant underground system of Shiksha. We share their stories, experiences, insights, opportunities and experiments through the Swapathgami Network. The Swapathgami Network is also called the network of walkouts and walkons; that is, people who have walked out of dehumanising, exploitative or violent situations, institutions, attitudes, products, etc., and who are walking on to live in more meaningful, authentic, healthy and honest ways. In the process of taking control of their own learning, they are re-discovering and co-creating many amazing learning opportunities around the country. It is a silent revolution. They are once again reminding us that millions of ways of understanding/knowing/being exist in the world, which are outside the scope of schooling.2 Are we willing to see these?

At Shikshantar, we are also exploring and regenerating the learning resources of our own city, in a process called Udaipur as a Learning City (ULC).3 One of my reasons for co-initiating this process was to open up more (un)-learning opportunities for both my daughter Kanku and me. In ULC, we are constantly looking for people and places around the city from whom we can learn to live a just and harmonious life. Most people are interested in finding relationships towards organic living, which includes city farming, composting, zero waste homes and zero waste neighborhoods, self-healing and herbal medicines, community media and urban space, bicycling and pedestrian power, healthy cooking, rainwater harvesting, and more… We are discovering once again that the home and neighbourhood are indeed powerful learning spaces for collaboration, creative experimentation and deep dialogue.

In all of these initiatives, we have found that it is important to find creative ways to engage with friends in the mainstream system. It is not enough to just be creating alternatives. For example, many of us need to Heal from the Diploma Disease. We recently came out with a publication of the same name4 that invites civil society organisations to stop using diplomas, degrees and certificates in their hiring and promotion processes. In its place, we ask that more appropriate systems of identifying and evaluating personnel be explored and used. This request has sparked a wider conversation about what we want to see manifest in our work and in our world, and we hope will help pave the way for more diversity in learning opportunities.

What now?
For me a critical point in my life was when I consciously stopped describing myself as a ‘teacher’ or a ‘planner/social engineer’ and started seeing my primary role as a ‘lifelong seeker of truths’. I do not see myself as Kanku’s teacher. In fact, I consider her to be one of my gurus since she has inspired me to take many new risks in my life. This shift should not be taken as yet another piece of superficial jargon – as is often done by the education establishment. It needs to start with some introspection, for example, by re-examining one’s own learning process up until now: what have been some powerful learning experiences in your life? Under what conditions have you learned best? What lies have you unlearned?5 What brings you real happiness? What are you curious/disturbed about now? Go explore it and share your journey with children. Invite them to do the same. Where are you feeling stagnant? What depresses you about your life? Share this as well. Perhaps they can help you find a way out. As long as one needs to be working in the education system, one can think about how to creatively subvert/dismantle its claims of authority and monocultural-ness. This is one of the primary challenges of our times. Shake up our own schooled mindsets. Reclaim our faith in the innate power of children and villagers to direct their own learning. Encourage your children to explore other opportunities and relationships outside of the four walls of schooling. Ridicule the examination system and its claim as a fair/useful form of evaluation. Refuse to be called a ‘product’ or a ‘human resource’. Make a strong commitment to regenerating peoples’ knowledge over expert/textual/institutional knowledge. Be creative. And perhaps, most importantly, open up real spaces to experiment and make mistakes.6

I realise, of course, this only works to a point (which is why I personally stopped trying to reform the education system). A friend once said, “It’s very hard to criticise something when your salary depends on not criticising it.” At one point or other, most teachers and schools have to come back to curriculum, textbooks, exams, etc., and more seriously, to the underlying politics and economy. In that authoritarian, unjust and artificial context, it is virtually impossible to sustain any real trust and authentic co-learning between yourself and the children.

So, for those who are genuinely interested in pursuing real shiksha and supporting others to do the same, I would frankly encourage you to walk out of the school system and walk-on to creating something new – learning spaces and learning webs that embody a deeper vision of human learning: ones that do not rest on commodification, competition, compartmentalisation or compulsion; ones that deepen human wisdom, imagination and friendship. Just remember that there are no readymade, mass-produced solutions (after all these years of being fooled over and over again, we should be really skeptical of anyone who offers/imposes these). We each need to invest ourselves in creating our own localised alternatives and connecting these to each other in dynamic ways. There can and should be a world with many streams, not just one mainstream. It is time for us in India to evolve a more mature vision of social equality – one that is not built on monoculture or copying the hypocritical West.

Since she was a baby, I have seen Kanku finding and choosing her own gurus (sources of inspiration) – of all shapes, sizes and species.7 Some of these are for a few fleeting minutes, others remain for many days. She negotiates and co-creates her own selfdiscipline and intensity. She is both moved and motivated by real world activities and problems. My experiences, co-learning with Kanku, have certainly made me believe that it is absolutely necessary to re-look at some of our core assumptions about how human beings learn and why we learn. This debate has to be opened up across the country with our friends, colleagues, children, grandparents, neighbours, leaders, etc. It should not be abstract or overly theoretical but rather start with our own honest personal and intimate experiences: How did schooling help deepen my learning capacities? How did schooling hinder/harm my learning capacities? What did I really gain and what did I really lose? What did my community really gain and lose? How has my local natural and cultural environment benefited and lost? The real debate is not about school vs. no school. It is about co-creating the best possible learning ecologies for ourselves and our children. This is what we are trying to do with Kanku and this is the invitation that I would like to extend to you as a reader. I look forward to being in a dialogue with you.

1. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/ls_discussion.html
2. One can learn more about their gatherings, and read issues of their magazine (in Hindi and in English) online: www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/walkoutsnetwork.htm
3. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/udaipur.html
4. www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/healingdiplomadisease.pdf
5. See my note “Ten Lies My School Taught Me” in Swapathgami: http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/
swapathgami_english1.pdf
6. Most so-called experiments in school are not really experiments as the result is known beforehand and there is no room to make mistakes.
7. See Co-Learning with Kanku: Some Experiences from 2006 at http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/
kanku2006bookfinal.pdf

Manish Jain is with an NGO, Shikshantar, that works in rural Rajasthan. He invites your questions, experiences and feedback at manish@swaraj.org

The elections created a number of upsets, with sure winners losing to children who rarely stood out as leaders and opinion makers. As soon as the officebearers were in place the students began to negotiate a date and time for the council meeting.

The first meeting was interesting but unruly, with the Speaker and some representatives trying, through uncertainty, chaos and hullabaloo, to create a procedure for validating the issues put up for discussion. In the second meeting a remarkable feature was the eagerness with which children were tagged as ‘problems requiring punishment’. Recommendations on improving the behaviour of such students ranged from ‘create a warning word to remind him to be good’ to ‘suspend him for a week!’ Interestingly, the gentler punishments were completely out-voted.

The inherent violence in the students made me wonder at the ease with which the tit-for-tat attitude is accepted as justice. At first, the middle of the road students stood by and watched as others took on the roles of heroes (the charmers, the intelligent, the talented) and villains (the left outs, the aggressive ones, the attention seekers). Little did these students realise how their passivity was shaping both the heroism and villainy. They further camouflaged their part by spontaneous membership to mobs within the Council, and attempted to appropriate power by shouting encouragement to the hero and damning the villain.

In response to this attitude, I began discussing collusion and its consequences with the students. I realised that for pre-adolescent children, the creation of rules by teachers and principals, against which they can rebel, has been the traditional method of creating a sense of identity. The challenge for schools in the coming years lies in enabling the students, instead, to identify and live by their own ethical rules based on justice and mutual respect. We must be able to elicit from students, their felt need to receive and provide justice, seek appropriate methods of meeting it and use it in their lives within the classroom. We must be able to demonstrate how Gandhiji’s satyagraha, when practised as it was meant, can create an equal and just community. I believe we can only do this by modelling and encouraging those responses, wherein bullying, isolating, or thieving in school are met with firmness, compassion and persuasion rather than hatred, punishment and violence.

Kavita Anand can be reached at panikker@rocketmail.com

In the beginning was the word
What better way to start than with some entomology etymology exploration? How did the term originate? What are the stories and myths behind the word? How are cultures reflected in the way a people seek to name a thing? For instance, the French use the term papillion; the Greek, psyche; the Germans schmetterling (from schmetten, a word first used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Czech smetana, both meaning “cream”, referring to the butterflies’ proclivity to hover around milk pails and butter churns). In English, it can be traced to buttorfleog – folk belief had it that the butterflies were really witches out to steal the cream! And what about the words in the Indian regional languages – why is it called sitakokachilaka in Telugu? Yet another story to explore!

Padmini Menon is a writer & editor based in Hyderabad. She can be reached at menon_p@hotmail.com

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

I appreciate the issues raised in the article and as expected it came from a teacher who is clear that things should shape themselves. We do find several small incidents happening around us but never care to learn lessons from them. The idea of thrashing out issues at the meeting table is amazingly noble.

However, I am afraid most people perceive schools as buildings used to teach students. For any it is a run-of-the-mill profession. The number of private, profit-making buildings sprawled all over the country is an example.

The school has to be unquestionably an ‘organic unit’ which offers numerous fulfilling experiences. The progress, from ‘me’ to ‘our’ and allowing others to ‘become’, is indeed schooling.

Success therefore is, according to John Maxwell, “knowing our purpose in life, growing to reach our maximum potential and sowing seeds to benefit others”.

I feel proud to be a teacher. It gets even better when I see and read such articles. The inner passion which drives me comes from the character of Santiago, a Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant Marlin, the largest catch of his life, in the award winning novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by E. Hemingway. He represents the courage, strength and endurance of the human race. He, like all men, struggled with faith (the fish) and both hated and loved life (the sea). The thing that truly defeated Santiago was his pride.

Suryaveer Singh
Geography teacher & Head of Dept. Social Science, S. D. Public School, Pitampura, New Delhi.