This poem is an outcome of the author’s attempt to explain about the curvature of the earth to her two 7-year-old nieces, who wondered why we don’t fall off the earth if it is round.

Hi li’l gals, how goes your day?
If you have the time, I have something to say:
I used today this tale to coin,
With your paper and pen you, too, can join!

Once upon a time, there was a dash

That felt alone and said “Alas!”
“Will I ever find a true friend?
So together we can our time spend?”

Along came another line
That tried with dash to align,
Together they looked a bit like this

Now will you draw with me, my pretty Miss?

Just think of more and more of these
That stand together, all at ease

Did you too draw like the set above?
Now just you wait for a tale you’ll love!

The lines decided to up and play
(After all, it was a sunny day)
So some stood up and some just sat
While some did this,
others did that

So look what happened when they got along

And oh! they sang a jolly song
And twisted and twirled as they moved along

It got such fun, that their game was long.

I am sure that both of you can see
How their sharp edges they rubbed off with glee
And more and more of their kith and kin
This merry gang just welcomed in

And then it happened one fine day
That all these lines held hands to pray
“We thank thee Lord” they sang and said
“For bringing together our tail and head!”

So from little lines, if a big huge round
Can form itself, so snug and sound
If we cut the round, bit by bit,
Lots of lines we’ll see, isn’t it?

A big huge earth, like the one we’re on,
Is made up of lots of lines in song,
And even one of these lines, you see,
Is much, much bigger than you or me!

Now can you see why it is that
When we’re on the earth, it seems flat?
But here’s what the moon has to say:
“Oh, the earth? It’s round, and far away!”

Neeraja Raghavan, is an educationist and scientist with Girls Education Plus, Bangalore. She can be reached at neeraja.raghavan@gmail.com.

I found this beautiful green caterpillar on a crape jasmine plant (Tabernaemontana divaricata; nandivardanam in Telugu) in my balcony. He had finished half of the leaves on my plant, and was still eating hungrily. I had always wanted to watch the life cycle of a butterfly/moth. Here was my chance! My friend Kobita had successfully reared this very caterpillar recently, and I thought I’d do it too. If I could pull it off, it would be the best biology lesson for my children, and the other kids in the building.

I put him along with the branch into a bottle with holes on the lid. We named him Bakasura… the rate at which he was eating inspired the name! There was a steady input/output, actually… he ate from one side and expelled seed-like black droppings from the other, sometimes simultaneously! (I had earlier sowed these droppings, thinking they were seeds!) This went on for one whole day.

Sadhana Ramchander is writer and editor with BluePencil Infodesign, Hyderabad. She can be reached at sadhana_bluepencil@yahoo.com.

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One of the most basic lessons in civics relates to the Indian Constitution. But like most civics lessons, this is taught as a dry and boring chapter with no relevance to our day to day life. But any teacher of social studies knows that all civic life is based on the Constitution, a document that defines the fabric of everyday existence in democratic India. This Republic Day, try to recapture some of the excitement that the designers of the Constitution must have felt 58 years ago, when it was adopted.

The Constitution of India came into force on 26^th January 1950 after 3 years of discussions in the Constituent Assembly among a large group of persons, from different regions and social groups in the country, many of who had been active in India’s struggle for freedom from British rule.

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Koalas are nocturnal animals, active during nights and asleep during the days. Koalas sleep for 18-20 hours. You may call them lazy but their diet makes it necessary that they sleep for long hours. Eucalyptus leaves, though highly toxic and low in nutrients, are rich in fibre, and digesting all that fibre requires a lot of energy, which is best conserved by sleeping. The koala’s digestive system is specially designed to detoxify the poisonous chemicals in the eucalyptus leaves. Its caceum or the fibre-digesting organ (present in all mammals including human beings) is very long (200 cms). The millions of bacteria present in the caceum break down the fibre in the leaves so that they can be easily absorbed. A joey (or a baby koala) is prepared for a eucalyptus diet in the mother’s pouch. When the joey is about six months old, the mother secretes a juicy substance called pap which has all the micro-organisms necessary to fight the toxins present in the eucalyptus leaves.

And finally did you know that the koala is the only other animal, apart from a human being, to have individual fingerprints? Like humans, each koala has a distinct fingerprint pattern. While koala fingerprints may not exactly match human fingerprints, there are enough similarities for an ordinary man to confuse a koala with a human.

Traditionally education has played two roles – a conservative one and a revolutionary one. The normal approach is a conservative one. The child is taught to conform and to perform. No society will design an education system to disrupt itself. It has to reproduce itself. When the existing society gets decadent and requires change, revolutionary elements begin to appear in the field of education. These are not introduced by the government. Those who lead revolutionary changes in the society begin to use education as a “subversive agent.” This has happened during the era of freedom struggle. Paulo Freire, Brazilian adult educator and one of the most influential thinkers on education in the late 20^th century, calls this, ‘education for liberation’. Here, we are talking about education as a tool for liberation of the society from inequality and leading it towards equity. That is a revolutionary role and not a conservative role. To declare ‘equity’ as desirable is a revolutionary step, unless we define it in a very narrow sense of providing ‘equal opportunities’. ‘Equal opportunities’ is a deceptive concept for two reasons. One, opportunities can seldom be equal in an iniquitous society. Two, equality in opportunity does not ensure equality in attainment. Only one can become the ‘First’ in a competition. There cannot be real equity in a competitive society. In the time of neo-liberalism, the players are global, the market is global. The forces are much larger. However the essence is the same. The welfare measures still retained are more in the form of charity.

Equity is not charity
When we speak of ‘education for equity’ we should have a shared understanding of the term “equity.” I do not define it in terms of ‘equal opportunity’ because I am convinced that in an inequitable society, there can never be equal opportunities. There are five star or even seven star institutions for education, health care, eating, entertainment which are inaccessable to a lot of people. The majority have schools without buildings, benches and teachers, they have hospitals without doctors and medicines, they have ration shops which sell grains unfit even for animals to eat. What equal opportunity can we provide for children with illiterate, hungry, slum dwelling parents, equal to the children of professors, professionals, officers, businessmen, etc? None. ‘Equal opportunity’ in an unequal society is a hoax.

Then what else could be equity? To put it simply, we can say that it is freedom to be what we can be. This is possible only in a different society; a society which distinguishes growth from development, a society which distinguishes need from greed, a society which understands welfare value as different from exchange value.

We have to speak of education, not for equity, but for transforming the inequitable world into one where equity is possible.

Is equity impossible?
Some may argue that equality is foreign to nature; no two things are identical. We are speaking about equity and not equality and definitely not of identity. Vulgar arguments like how socialism is impractical, just like the five fingers in a hand are unequal, have been raised in the case of equity too. When one tries to define an equitable world, people shout: “Oh, that is sheer Utopia”, meaning thereby that it is absolutely impractical. This is not so. Let me try to share with you my idea about an equitable society.

The key word to equity is emancipation or equality in freedom. Emancipation implies both physical and spiritual emancipation; it means steady increase in Physical Quality of Life (PQL) and Spiritual Quality of Life (SQL). This means, again

• Steady increase in life expectation, decrease in morbidity, and in infant mortality rate.
• Steady reduction in the feeling of insecurity.
• High level of intragenerational and intergenerational justice (equality and sustainability).
• Steady increase in the status of women.

Education for equity thus primarily lies, according to me, in the so-called domain of attitudes and values. A change in that will make sharing of knowledge and skills more universal.

Extracted from an address delivered at the National Learning Conference organised by the Azim Premji Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Human Resource Development in Bangalore on May 24-26 2007.

The writer is with the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, Thiruvananthapuram. He can be reached at mpparam@sancharnet.in

A guy shows up late for work. The boss yells, “You should’ve been here at 8:30!”
The guy replies, “Why? What happened at 8:30?”
(Readers’ Digest, September 2005)

Laughter with an active sense of humour, recent researches tell us, is the best medicine to keep fit and healthy. Humour not only allows us to live longer but also aids in our mental development. People who laugh and joke more, it has been found, have sharper and more alert minds than those who don’t. Therefore, don’t let the pressures of teaching keep you from sharing a joke with your colleagues, or from ensuring that your classes are filled with laughter. And what better way to do this than to get the whole school involved in a humour week? Make a conscious effort to look at the lighter side of things despite the pressures of school – and you will probably find that it sets a tone that makes those pressures easier to bear! And along the way, we would have learned some interesting lessons in areas ranging from biology to literature… to life!

What is humour?
Humour happens when you walk along an expected path only to reach an unexpected destination. Take any joke, or funny movie, or book that you may have seen or read and you will realise that this is true. We actually find pleasure in knowing that we are wrong. Look at the above joke. If the second part of that joke was hidden and we were asked what happened next, we would probably say that the man was suspended, or that he was given a warning. When the second part of the joke is revealed, and we see how wrong we were, we laugh instinctively.

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A teacher should always ensure that classroom interactions are enjoyable and meaningful to the students. The learning theory of multiple intelligences advocates the use of music and poetry as a medium of learning any subject, along with developing verbal skills, logical thinking skills, visual skills, kinesthetic skills, inter-personal skills and intra-personal skills of children. Often, the use of music and poetic art forms to teach various subjects is ignored in institutions.

Haiku poems: Be a poet without fuss!!
Haiku is an easy-to-create Japanese folk poetic form involving a single sentence or statement broken into three lines with five, seven, and five syllables in the first, second and third lines respectively.

The author is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Unfolding Learning Potentials, Jaipur. He can be reached at lalit_culp@rediffmail.com.

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Once upon a time, knowledge was transferred from one generation to another by word of mouth. Then came palm leaves, sand trays and the chalkboard. In the last century, our classrooms witnessed the introduction of electric and electronic gadgetry including the PC. The change continues to this day, in both the media and the modes of delivery of knowledge. Today, in the information age, the most important catalyst of change seems to be the Internet and computer assisted technologies!

Currently, an increasing number of urban schools in the developing world are using audio-visual multimedia material published by traditional textbook publishers as their effective curriculum. With a growing number of K-12 multimedia manufacturers in the market, the selection of multimedia products has become more difficult than it used to be a decade ago. However, my colleagues were able to select material using the format (with a 0 to 4 rating) I developed a few years back, when faced with the problem for the first time:

Panamalai R Guruprasad is a Chennai-based education consultant involved in curriculum and teacher-develop-ment. He can be reached at p_r_guruprasad@vsnl.net

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The debate on school education in India is one with many ramifications, and there is a very distinct drawing of lines between mainstream education and alternative education.

“When… the mainstream resists the assimilation of new ideas, the system ossifies,” says Prof. Krishna Kumar’s in his Foreword to the book Alternative Schooling in India, edited by Sarojini Vittachi and Neeraja Raghavan, emphasising that the system needs to be made porous enough for new ideas to slip into the system and germinate there. Like he rightly points out, this book opens up such a possibility.

Sarojini Vittachi’s introduction clarifies straightaway that alternative education is explored here as “enhancement of education”, and discusses what education needs to be. She also sets down some ideas about what a “relevant and liberating education” should include – for instance, being child focussed, allowing learning in multiple ways, meeting a child’s life-enriching needs, etc. Such education, she points out, is actually an alternative to mainstream education, which focus on results and ranking.

Rather than define alternative education, the book identifies a set of features which alternative schools have one or more of (boxed on facing page). Each of these features bears much thinking about, and there are many different ways in which each finds expression – as one finds out when one goes through the directory of schools later in the book. The book progresses from a brief overview of the history of alternative education and establishes a continuity right to the present day: and in drawing attention to this, provides a heartening view in that we find more and more dissatisfaction with mainstream education today, a sure sign of better things to come.

Neeraja Raghavan’s enquiry into whether, and how, innovations from alternative schools can spread to mainstream schools is revealing in that it is a comment upon not only the ‘system’ but upon individuals as makers of the system. On the one hand, she highlights the gaps in the system that need to be addressed, such as the necessity of periodic refreshment of in-service teachers through training and sabbaticals, making teachers versatile by encouraging and even requiring them to learn a subject other than theirs, or the need to empower teachers with a sense of professionalism by addressing monetary concerns and to meaningfully involve parents as partners in the education of their children. On the other, Raghavan also suggests that learning materials be constantly reappraised and vibrant material offered to children. And in seeking that inspirational tales of true learning be given a platform, she points to the need to also constantly assess our teaching techniques and methodologies. And lest one take all this as a good lesson but impractical, she sums up her argument quoting Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

From this point on, Alternative Schooling itself becomes a platform for voices from the “alternative” set up. Essays and experiences from people who head some alternate schools are followed by interviews with various people: a parent whose child went to an alternative school, students who are in alternative schools or have moved between alternative and mainstream schools, successful people who went to alternative schools… offering not authoritative statements about alternative education, but windows into the world of alternative education.

The section “Come after school” showcases the efforts of some mainstream schools that try to meet the needs of the students despite the bind of the system – and in doing so, offer some possible solutions for other schools that want to do the same.

The last section of the book is a Directory of Alternative Schools – a veritable mine of information made available for the first time in a printed form, with some information about each school. The editors acknowledge that this is neither an exhaustive list, nor one that in any way judges the quality of the schools – those are tasks that still have to be taken up, and the hope is that schools themselves will come forward and ask to be added to the list!

One does feel, however, that some issues could perhaps have been discussed in greater detail – for instance, although there is no single idea of ‘alternative’ schooling, there are clear differences in the various philosophies that these schools follow. The Krishnamurthi schools, for example, discourage competition, but this is not necessarily true of the others. Some light could have been thrown on such philosophies in practice by other practitioners too, for the benefit of the interested parent or teacher. One also hopes that for further editions of this book, school visits be made and a closer look is taken at each school: this kind of engagement will add immensely to the value of the book.

That said, one must acknowledge that Alternative Schooling works not only towards increasing the awareness about the existence of alternative schools, but plainly shows that when one speaks of “alternative schools”, one is pointing to a variety of alternatives to the existing educational norms. And in doing so, it opens up the possibility for individual schools to take up new ideas and addressing the lacunae in the system at the micro level – where they really can make the difference.

Alternative Schooling in India

Edited by Sarojini Vittachi and Neeraja Raghavan
with Kiran Raj
With a Directory of Alternative Schools in India
Sage Publications, 2007
pp. 268, Price Rs. 360/-

Alternative schools generally have one or more of the following features

• The Approach is more individualised than that of a mainstream school. There is no ONE model school, and so, the approach of alternative schools defies pigeonholing.
• Respect is accorded to the student, parent and teacher irrespective of socio-economic status and (special) abilities. Integration of children of mixed abilities and/or different socio-economic groups, and sometimes even of mixed ages, is a key element.
• Learning that is more experiential and interest-based is encouraged rather than learning out of a textbook or from a class lecture.
• Disciplines are cross-linked so that the boundaries of knowledge are diffused and the child is able to see connections across various fields of learning.
• Class size is kept small. Typically, one teacher does not teach more than 25–30 children.
• Class structure is experimented with, by allowing flexibility in the spread of ages or even interflow between different ‘grades’ or ‘standards’ for different subjects. Physical classroom spaces are also broken free of by many so that the walls of the conventional classroom dissolve even as they allow learning to take place outdoors.
• Administration is conducted in a democratic and somewhat flexible manner. With hierarchical structures being less and less prevalent, these schools experiment win rotating responsibilities, arriving at major decisions through consensus and taking collective ownership for the institution and what it stands for.
• Evaluation methods are explored in various ways, not always relying on conventional tests and examinations.
• Affiliation to the most popular Board may not be sought. These schools attempt to explore new topics and syllabi that are not prescribed by conventional Boards. However, this does not mean that such schools do not prepare their students for government-approved examinations to complete and enter universities.
• Success rate is not measured only by the performance of the students in competitions, examinations and other such external benchmarks. Their learning outcomes are a blend of measurable and immeasurable parameters.

Tangrams use varying arrangements of seven basic geometric shapes called ‘tans’ – five triangles of different sizes, a square and a rhomboid. The game lies in trying to recreate a solid figure such as those shown here, using all seven pieces. The proportions should exactly match the given shape, with no extra indentations along the edges.

Try your hand at the tangrams shown here. Remember, you need to use ALL seven pieces to build the figure, and in EXACTLY the same proportions! You can play the game with another person, by setting a time limit within which you need to finish as many as you can. Often tangrams are played in a competitive manner, each person using his or her own set of tans.

Make your own tangrams
Tans can be made using any reasonably stiff material that can be cut or formed into a shape. Draw a one inch (or 3 cm/4 cm.) grid on the material to make a puzzle of a comfortable size. Then mark off the white lines as shown in the figure. Cut carefully along these white lines. This will produce the seven tan pieces. Note that slicing rather than sawing will produce the best result. The wider the cuts, the more the pieces lose along one or more sides, making the piece not quite “true”. A knife or thin cutter would work well.

You can also create your own puzzles and categorise them into various types of shapes (animals, people, things or symbols) – and try making some of your own. Let us know if you had fun with them. Even better, send them to us so we can share them with other Teacher Plus readers!