Page 360 – Teacher Plus

Inviting Contributions

Technology in its various forms has infiltrated every aspect of our professional, personal and social lives. In this issue of Teacher Plus, we examine how technology plays a role in education–both from the perspective of the facilitator (the teacher) and the learner. How does it change the way we do things in the classroom and learn both inside and outside school? How can it be used in a way that serves our needs, rather than make us a slave to it? Tell us about your ideas about and experiences with technology–computers, electronics, toys, display devices, and such–in and out of the classroom. What are your concerns and your expectations, your fears and your hopes, when faced with technology? For more information on guidelines for authors, please Click Here

Forum

As a physical education teacher, I sincerely wish you would address some concerns through your magazine. While we all know education is meant to groom children into future citizens, the pressure of the school curriculum, the amount of learning that is involved and rigorous exam schedules are keeping children away from interacting with people at social gatherings and preventing them from participating in physical activities. Earlier, school holidays gave children and parents the chance to spend time with each other, but with holidays also being taken up to complete the syllabus, this valuable time has been drastically cut short. Children today are also not appreciative of our country’s several festivals. If we wish to turn our children into responsible citizens then it requires the combined effort of the school management, teachers and parents to provide ample opportunities to imbibe social values and ethics. Ravi Bhadoria Bharuch Dist., Gujarat Congratulations I want to congratulate you for coming up with such a nice 20th anniversary issue. Enjoyed reading it immensely, specially the article titled “An index finger and his red little tail”. Good Luck and wish you continue the good work decade after decade. Jyothi Padmanabhan Iyer Secunderabad

Fitness and The Teacher

Long hours hunched over notebooks, reading often illegible handwriting in poorly lit and sometimes poorly ventilated staffrooms, arm raised for minutes at a time writing on the blackboard, shoulders slumped with the weight of two score and more books…and we have not even started on the psychological stresses of school work! Contrary to popular opinion, a teacher’s workday is not exactly a cakewalk, as readers of Teacher Plus are well aware. There are slow, steady physical stresses that can eat away at a person’s physical well-being, and by the time the forties hit, many of us are feeling the consequences of bad posture, chalk dust allergies, strained eyes, etc. Every job has its own set of physical demands, and teaching is no different. Even within the teaching profession, there are a multitude of contexts and each school, in fact every classroom, might offer its own unique set of demands! A nursery school teacher might have to pick up and carry children more often, while a high school teacher might have to spend more time hunched over complex projects. A middle school teacher might spend a large part of her day straining her arm writing equations on the board, while a special education teacher may end up organising and reorganising classroom materials. How then does one stay fit and fresh through all this? We may not be able to do much about the stresses that come from the specific nature of the job – difficult or disruptive students, staffroom and school politics, parent expectations and work load – but we can to some extent take care of our bodies and keep ourselves in shape so we are better able to deal with our physical environments and the demands they place on us. While a general fitness regime is a good idea no matter what kind of work one does, it may be useful to think about the specific ways in which you need to exert yourself, and compensate for that through exercise or relaxation techniques that address those specific c parts of the body. Those who sit for long hours at the computer are advised to take a regular fl ex-ex break every two hours or so, to relieve the stresses that build up in the shoulders, upper arms, back and wrists. Gardeners and others who hunch or squat need to stretch periodically to release the cramps that may occur in their upper thighs, shoulders and abdomen. Teachers too can pay attention to those parts of

Hard Decisions

The question that may be at the top of every regular reader’s mind is the increase in the price of the magazine beginning this issue.

What’s in a name?

by S Upendran,

Madras eye, Delhi belly, Oxford blue, Mexican wave, and American dream. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the first element in the expressions that have been listed is the name of a well-known place…

Listen while you learn

Ratna Rao How does a child learn his native tongue? By listening. The child starts listening, some say, even while in the womb of the mother, to the sounds of the language the mother speaks. Listening is the foundation of any language teaching and learning process. But unfortunately, listening is one skill that is today given the least importance in the process of teaching and learning the English language. According to some studies a new born baby can recongnise the sound of the door bell or the ringing of the phone in his/her home as he/she must have heard it many a times in the womb. The example of Abhimanyu from our mythology will suffice to prove this point. But strangely this skill is never taught. It is taken for granted that the child already knows how to listen. That’s why we now have a generation of students who have no patience for listening; the only thing they are interested in is speaking and putting forth their ideas and opinions. Good listening skills can make a student an excellent speaker and a person who has patience can imbibe/ learn more through listening. The author is a teacher trainer and is currently a teacher at Calorx Teachers’ University, Ahmedabad. She can be reached at ratnar_p@yahoo.co.in This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.

Sleight of Teaching

by Meghana Rao
Magic in a classroom? Yes! Could there be anything more fascinating? Use magic in the classroom to liven things up, build a rapport and to teach.

Will the sweeping reforms sweep through?

It’s being debated on television, in staff rooms and drawing rooms, and people have a variety of opinions about Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal’s radical proposal to reform some aspects of school education. At the top of this list is the idea of making the CBSE class 10 board examinations optional, followed by exploring the possibility of a single nationwide board for class 12, and having an independent accreditation authority for school education. Dealing with the class 10 examination is only the tip of this iceberg, but it has thrown open a variety of questions ranging from what examinations do for learning if anything, to what else needs to happen within schools to ensure that children emerge with the ability to handle and contribute to a complex social and economic system. Mr. Sibal himself has emphasized that the debate is not about the exam per se, though that is what has attracted most attention, but that the debate is really about the kind of India we want, the kind of people we want as future citizens of India – recognising that this shaping of the future citizens happens in school. Clearly, there are many issues to be dissected and examined in detail at the national, state and local level before these proposals can begin to be formalised, let alone implemented. There are many stakeholders – parents, teachers, school administrators, textbook publishers and materials developers, and the children themselves – whose viewpoints matter and who need to be heard before any movement can happen. But the one big positive development here has been that for the first time, school education – its very fabric – is on the national agenda and is being talked about at length and in depth by people in power. It presents an opportunity for those of us committed to education reform to keep at these questions and try to demand that they be addressed – better teachers, better standards, better infrastructure – before we can even talk about what the removal of the pressures signified by the board examination can signify!

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

Usha Raman If there’s any motif that is close to being universal, it is bread. Roti, pao, pan, pita, pain… and a hundred other names (at least) are used to describe this most basic of foods, but the role it plays within a meal, on the table, in the culinary traditions of the world, is unmatched. Planning a project on bread may at first seem to be a case of biting off more than one can chew, but even a thin slice of the loaf should offer rich intellectual repast (if one will forgive the over-use of metaphor!). The obvious place to begin would seem to be the product itself. Ask the children to talk about what they have brought to lunch. You should get a variety of answers, and some of them may include some form of bread, ranging from the ever-popular sandwich to the alu paratha or puri. Most of us may have a limited definition of ‘bread’, taking it to be only that which is baked in an oven and shaped like a loaf – but indeed, bread comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and forms, and only some of it is baked in a conventional oven. But more about that later. From their lunch boxes, travel outward and outfield to prompt them to think about how bread is made, the different names it is known by, how it is served and eaten, idioms and phrases associated with it, and stories where bread plays an important role. You’ll probably end up with a chaotic discussion that goes all over the place, and it will be quite a task to contain it within the confines of a single subject. But isn’t that what a project is all about? This would be a good way to set out the various directions this project will take and give the students an idea of all the activities and topics they will have to engage in over the next few days. It might help if a small group of teachers could brainstorm this together and see how they can divide the project work into discrete classroom units, spread over several subjects. The ideas given here can be worked into different curricular areas. The more obvious ones are science (yeast as a leavening agent, oven design and baking bread, nutrition, etc.), history and geography (cereal production and the kinds of bread made across the world, ceremonial and celebratory breads, the history of bread making), and language (origins

Inviting Contributions

Forum

Fitness and The Teacher

Hard Decisions

What’s in a name?

Listen while you learn

Sleight of Teaching

Will the sweeping reforms sweep through?

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

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