How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand

In July of 2006, I received an e-mail from Richard K. Weems, who directs the creative writing division of the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts. He had hired me to teach poetry to a group of gifted high school students later that month, and he wanted to know if I was interested in conducting a “Drive-by poetry” field trip, which is what past teachers had done.

Drive-by poetry, as Rich described it, entails loading the students into a van, cruising around a commercial area in Trenton, and pulling over near targeted pedestrians. One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades – or accosts – the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

The author is a poet and writer based in USA. He can be reached at doug@janestreet.com.

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High school social studies curricula are generally planned so as to prepare children to enter life in a democracy as responsible and participative adult citizens. It’s a different matter, of course, that we tend to forget this and treat them as just paper lessons to be memorized and reproduced! So from linear and descriptive accounts of wars and movements, people and places, and features of the Indian democratic system, textbooks move into more relevant (in a contemporary and direct sense) discussions of recent history, the mechanisms of participative democracy, and the conflicts and contradictions inherent in processes of development. Children begin to ask more searching questions, and discover that the answers are not always available or to their liking, and many answers actually make them uncomfortable. The classroom then becomes a space where they discover their place in society, and learn to negotiate their way through life, dealing with issues of power, hierarchy, rules and regulations, justice and denial. Of course, these are issues they have in some manner dealt with all through their childhood, but now they have a name and a whole discourse surrounding them that they begin to engage with.

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‘Ideas are sacred. If you get them in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.’

My little world brightened up one fine morning when I was ready to implement an idea. It all started with a feedback form. Some students of the Class of 2003 had written that they found my history classes monotonous. The thought kept rankling; I was one of the many teachers responsible for making history a boring subject for students.

I resolved to do something about it in the new academic session. Things fell in place on the first day itself. When I entered my class and saw new faces staring at me with enthusiasm, an idea came to me. Why not get it from the horse’s mouth? I asked my new students to write a small paragraph each on what they expected from a history class. When I read their write-ups I saw that my 15-year old students were brimming with ideas on how to make history classes interesting. They had listed down things like field trips, interactive lessons followed by discussions, quizzes, power point presentations, research time in the library, and debates.

Anita Choudhary teaches History at the Bluebells School, Delhi. She can be reached at anita_wanchoo@hotmail.com.

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But what does it mean?

Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize brought an important issue into the limelight – climate change and global warming, interrelated issues that have taken up a lot of space and time in the mass media. The former US Vice President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” did its bit to raise awareness and rekindle debate about the causes and consequences of environmental change. The fact that an Indian scientist, Dr R K Pachauri, is leading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) created ripples of interest in the topic across India as well.

The debate may not have escaped the attention of your students – many young people are extremely passionate about environmental issues and it is not difficult to excite their interest in things that (it is clear) will affect their access to natural resources in the not too distant future. As they prepare for the summer holidays, get them thinking how lifestyle changes have impacted their immediate environment and how these changes in turn have led to changes in the way we live, work and travel. Earth Day (observed by the United Nations on the spring equinox, March 22, and by several environmental groups on April 22) occurs right in the middle of examination season or the beginning of the holidays so it is often difficult to plan an event on the day. The next best thing therefore is to give students something to think about on Earth Day and carry it through as an activity during the summer holidays. If they are in class 9 going into the 10th, this could be one of their final year projects for Environmental Education, which is now a compulsory subject in most boards. It could also form the basis for an introductory discussion on environmental change, as this is the focus of much of the EVE syllabus.

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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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Many students find word problem solving difficult right through high school. One approach to helping them is to analyse what strategies successful problem solvers use. Although they may have spontaneously developed these, we can teach other students these strategies in a more explicit way.

Research has shown that those children who are generally good at word problem solving have the ability to represent the problem in a mental model. This mental model contains all the relevant information in the problem, with the inter-relationships and connections between elements properly represented. On the other hand, poor problem solvers base their solution on numbers and keywords in the problem, which they directly translate into some arithmetical operation.

Kamala Mukunda works with the Centre for Learning, Bangalore, and she can be reached at <kamala.mukunda@gmail.com>.

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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