Staying afloat

Usha Raman

Access to information is quick and easy these days. There is no dearth of information or the ways in which we can find it. Therefore it is easy to become overwhelmed, get lost, and be confused. As teachers it is necessary that we tell our students how they can sort through and use the right kind of information to further their learning. But to teach our students that we first have to develop our own strategies of dealing with information overload.

A circle in which to learn and grow

Carmen Gloria Garrido Barra and Elena Quezada Cárdenas

Are your students not keen readers, especially of the literary texts? If you are wondering how to bring some interest in reading among your students get them to form Literature Circles and discuss, draw, question books of their choice. You will soon see that apart from developing an appreciation for reading your students have also developed social and cognitive skills.

Making homework child friendly

Shailendra Gupta

Homework is an essential part of a student’s life but more often than not we find that student’s don’t do their homework. Instead of admonishing the child and continuing with our teaching let us try and understand the importance of homework first and then spice up our student’s homework assignments so that they will want to do them.

Another point of view

Aditi Mathur and Ratnesh Mathur

In the March issue you were given a different kind of quiz. Here you can compare your responses to those of the authors who have chosen their own responses and tell you the reasons for their choices.

A question of agreement

Geetha Durairajan

How often have we not heard sentences like, ‘I is happy,’ or ‘Everyone have come today’? If a student or for that matter a teacher gets the subject-verb agreement wrong does it mean that he/she needs a remedial course in grammar? That he/she doesn’t know English? That he/she cannot speak the language? Well remedial courses are not the answers to every problem and a remedial course in grammar certainly won’t help in any way in improving the way one speaks the English language.

A little ingenuity and support

Neeraja Raghavan

In the concluding part of the article discussing differentiation of instruction in the classroom, teachers talk about how administrative support and the freedom to tweak teaching methods will help teach each student effectively.

The green house effect

Yasmin Jayathirtha

Global warming–a word that is so often in the news these days. While we are all aware of what global warming means do we really know why it is happening and how? Here are a couple of experiments that show, on a much smaller scale of course, how global warming happens.

Giving teacher education a fillip

Deepesh Chandrasekharan

The Teacher Education Conference organized by the British Council and English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, is reportedly the largest such conference in the country. With a focus on quality in English language teacher education, the conference this year had prominent people from the field of English language education speaking to and engaging the participants. A report of the event.

Show me the money…

Bubla Basu

Every professional can apparently discuss and even demand money but not teachers. Why this distinction? Aren’t teachers professionals like anybody else? Why then do we expect them to be selfless? Teachers too can and should talk about money for providing their expertise.

Why threats don’t always work

Sharmila Govande

What is our instinctive reaction to a disobedient child? Most of us will give some kind of a punishment in the hope that the child will not make the same mistakes again. But how effective are punishments? Doesn’t it make more sense to talk to the child about the consequences of a certain behaviour and help them understand why certain things are allowed and why others not?