Drawing from intuition

Tapasya Saha

As a teacher, how do you make students understand a concept, whatever may be the age group?

This is not a new topic for discussion – teachers all over the world ponder over this one matter very often, and perhaps, end up improvising their lesson plans over and over again.

What is also true is that without any prior thought or planning, a teacher is sometimes greatly helped by her intuition, which results in the flash of an idea. Experience and knowledge give the teacher an edge to think spontaneously and use that idea to make learning happen then and there. And if the teacher is able to see that the concept which she is trying to teach has penetrated the child’s mind, perhaps that creates an ‘Aha’ moment for her.

A major criterion for teaching, I believe is contextualizing the theme or concept to be taught. Every child brings in her own context – generalization is, therefore, seldom easy or fruitful. As a teacher, I mostly try to use the surroundings to make my teaching comprehensible and impactful. What exactly do I mean by this?

Some examples might help illustrate what I mean.

Silk Industry
I was teaching the ‘Silk industry of India’ to grade IX. I intended to make the students perceive the various types of silk found in different parts of India. So I planned carefully and wore silk saris to school for the entire week. Students could actually learn and discuss about the physical characteristics of each variety of silk by observing, touching and feeling the fibers and comparing them.

Monsoon
Then again, I have always made it a point to teach ‘Monsoon’ mostly during the month of August. Looking out of the classroom window and experiencing rain at any time of the day, (which is sometimes continuous for days on end), the sudden return of bright sunny days before a re-run of the same monotonous cloudy and rainy days are all brought into classroom discussions. Then, these experiences are linked and connections that are made with the ‘how and why’ of the monsoon make the concept easier to relate to and understand. Weather reports and pictures of the cloud cover over the Indian sub-continent that appear in the newspapers during these months also initiate experiential self-learning, rather than reading and memorizing from the textbook. I have observed that the answers then come more from students’ understanding and are not simply the bookish knowledge they otherwise produce. The ones who do not enjoy the subject also show interest and take away something from the class. I find this clearly reflected in their answers.

Agriculture
‘Agriculture’ is an important topic in geography and one of the determining factors is the ‘height’ of the terrain where certain crops are grown. Most of the time, students blindly memorize the names of the crops and the height they are grown at. It is, of course, difficult to make students experience various heights when they are all seated inside a classroom. To make this lesson a little more interesting – and also to make them more curious – I collected pictures of plains, plateaus, hills, mountains, river deltas, etc., and prepared small packets of tea, coffee, rice, wheat, jute, potatoes, etc. Students were then asked to match the crops with the pictures, showing various relief features. Now the students came out with lots of ‘why’ questions, which made teaching-learning more meaningful. Many others were confused. This led to a lively discussion, and heated debates broke out, and thus, many myths and wrong beliefs were organically done away with.

Seasons
It is quite difficult to make children understand the concept of ‘reversal of seasons between the hemispheres’ and that seasons are caused by the rotation of the earth on a tilted axis. Each time I explain that sometimes one half of the earth tilts towards the sun creating summer season in that hemisphere, while its other half tilts away from the sun creating winter season over there, even explaining this with the help of a diagram on the board always falls flat. I have been facing this issue every year. My eyes used to meet the blank looks of students and I always found myself losing ground.

I had no clue about how to explain this to eleven-year-olds.

Suddenly, one day, as I looked out of my classroom-door, my eyes fell on the sunrays entering the courtyard. I quickly gathered black and white paint and brushes from the school store and took the children outside.

“Children, let’s see if what I explained to you with the help of the diagram just now can actually be seen!” I declared, “All we have to do is mark the sun rays with black paint. Children, make sure that these marks are not removed under any circumstances. Also write the time and date for each mark.”

As you can guess, a great deal of excitement ensued amongst the children, in the middle of which the sunrays were marked with alternate lines of black and white paint. The date and time were also written against each of these lines.

“We are experiencing our summer season,” I announced.

In winter, again we did the same exercise maintaining the dates and time. What do you think we saw? Several questions arose when children observed not only the differences in the angle of the rays and but also the opposite direction of the sun’s rays. It was a year-long project but quite effective. Later on, I mused, a table could have been created to record the observations.

Cell phones
A six-year-old child came up to me one day and told me that he thought the mobile phone is magical, because he can talk to his Tauji in Mumbai from here in Sirohi. He also asked for an explanation to understand this phenomenon.

I was at my wit’s end. How do I give an accurate and logical explanation for this technological feat, which this young child from a remote village (Mandwa, in Rajasthan) can grasp?

I designed a display on a chart paper with pictures of the first satellite launched into space, an old model of a telephone, a picture of a modern satellite, TV and satellite towers, TV Centre of Jaipur, Dish antenna, commonly seen on rooftops even in Mandwa, and a mobile phone. I put it up for display in the courtyard of the school, where all could see. I found many students crowding around it, observing the display with curiosity and discussing amongst themselves. This went on for about a week.

The following week, I did an activity with the class: an old game that I had played as a child: making a telephone with a piece of long, strong thread and two match boxes. Children talked to each other from different rooms, and yes, they could hear clearly, some of them even noticed the vibration of the threads due to the sound waves when one spoke.

But then, do mobile phones have wires?

Here is where my chart with pictures helped. I took the children to the courtyard and discussed about the man-made satellite revolving around the earth, explaining that these can receive and send back signals or waves to the towers, which we can see everywhere on land. These towers receive and transmit signals from one mobile phone to the other, when someone dials another’s number and the two can speak. Similarly, we can see a TV programme when our dish antenna receives signals from a satellite.

These are just a few of my experiences of contextualizing geography content so as to help children grasp concepts, no matter how complex the content or how young the children may be!

The author has been a high school geography teacher for 14 years. She is now working as a subject specialist at the Azim Premji Foundation. She can be reached at tapasya@azimpremjifoundation.org.