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.
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.
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
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
Sheel
Learning by doing is a cliché today; and yet, one can breathe new life into it constantly.
The concept of colour requires an understanding of several basic concepts in optics as well as light perception from a biological standpoint. By the time students are in middle school, they are becoming familiar with the idea that light travels at a specific speed and that this speed depends on the medium through which it is travelling. Variations in the speed are perceived by the eye in several ways. For example, when light goes through a transparent substance such as water or glass, it gets bent slightly. This is due to the fact that light travels much more slowly through these substances than it does through air. When it goes from one medium into the next, the slowing down (or speeding up) causes it to change direction, so that the rays are ‘bent’. This is similar to what happens when a stone is thrown into a pond. You may have thrown it at a certain angle, but when it hits the water and sinks, it does not continue to travel in the same angle as it hit the water, but slows down and travels down in an altered angle. Adapted from an article that appeared in Teacher Plus, July/August 1995 This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.
S Upendran “I was the best man at the wedding. If I’m the best man, why is she marrying him?” – Jerry Seinfeld Good question Jerry. If you are the best man, why is the girl marrying your friend and not you? The groom may not have a face to launch a thousand ships, but shouldn’t the poor bloke be dubbed ‘the best man’ at least on his wedding day? Why has a groom, for several centuries now, always had the best man standing next to him at the altar? Shouldn’t the groom be the cynosure of all eyes? Instead, he chooses to share the limelight with another male on this very important day! Doesn’t really make sense, does it? Well, it does once you get the lowdown on how weddings were performed several centuries ago. In the not so good old days, men usually married women from their own village. But sometimes it so happened that there weren’t any eligible girls around. What did they do then? Unlike parents in India, they didn’t hand over their horoscope to the priest/friends and ask them to find a suitable girl from the next village. No, the European men took matters into their own hands; they found a girl for themselves. What you have to remember is that strangers weren’t welcome in villages those days; so there was no chance of a man going to the next village on an everyday basis and wooing the woman of his choice. Romance was just out of the question. When a man wanted a woman, he had to do what a man had to do! He had to find a girl, grab her as quickly as possible and make a run for it. In other words, he had to kidnap her. Easier said than done of course. Though movies make it look simple, kidnapping is not easy business – especially when you don’t have a car to dump your victim into. It’s difficult to grab hold of someone on your own and then force her to walk back to your village. The groom needed help to pull this off. He needed someone who was strong, who knew how to fight and whom he could trust. He needed to figure out who the ‘best man’ for this not so delicate job was! The original ‘best man’ was someone who aided his friend in kidnapping a girl; the dude was a partner in crime. This explains a lot of things. It tells
Padmasini Ranganath Understanding the human body in its entirety can be difficult for children who are often overwhelmed by the complexity of the whole. One way to simplify it, yet indicate the extent of its complexity, is to compare it to a machine with many different parts, each with a different purpose and structure. This article draws a parallel between the body and a machine. Human beings and machines are somewhat alike. They are both very complicated, each does a lot of work, each needs care and each wears out. But will man ever be able to build anything as wonderful as the human body? There is so much about it that we do not fully understand or appreciate. The one thing we do know is that the human body requires more care than a machine if it is to remain in a good condition for seventy or eighty years. (Extracted from Teacher Plus, Nov-Dec, 2001) This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.
Pawan Singh
Films are fun, aren’t they? The idea of a free weekend and a new movie playing at the nearby theatre can tempt most of us.
S Upendran “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” Jacques Barzun So true, isn’t it? Next month the entire country will go through the farce of celebrating Teachers’ Day. It’s the day when students take pity on their gurus, and decide not to drag them out of the classroom to beat the living daylights out of them. It’s also the day when politicians with little or no education themselves drape shawls around a few of our ageing colleagues, grab the mike, and go into rhapsodies about the so called ‘noble profession’. Noble profession! Who are the jokers kidding? If it were such a noble profession, then why don’t our not so beloved leaders instruct their sons to embrace it? Why is it they marry off their daughters to businessmen or NRIs, and never to a humble teacher? Are we practicing teachers so low on the totem pole that we are not even considered potential son-in-law material? Is it only politicians who think this way, or are there others who willingly subscribe their view? What does the younger generation, which has its fingers firmly on the public pulse, think of teachers? Would they be willing sign one on as their life partner? I posed this question to a group of M. A. students and their immediate response was to guffaw. Is marrying someone from our tribe such a potty idea? “Marrying someone from the teaching profession? No way!” said Aijamal rolling her eyes to emphasise how ridiculous the very thought was. “They are so boring,” she added, with a wealth of emotion. My Adam’s apple did one of those quick galloping exercises. Teachers, boring? That can’t be right. I must have heard wrong. Fat chance! A few seconds later, her sentiments were echoed by her friend who employed the word ‘boring’ repeatedly to describe teachers. The Adam’s apple did another quick gallop. Were these girls trying to tell me something about my teaching? Teja twisted the knife further by pronouncing teachers as ‘not fun’ material. (And if the singer with the prismatic hair, Cindy Lauper, is to be believed, girls just want to have fun!) Anwesha readily agreed that teachers couldn’t be any fun. When pressed for a reason, she replied that since teachers were keen on ‘updating’ their knowledge, they spent all their time reading! ‘Life with them would be boring because they would not have time for anything else,’ she concluded. I was tempted to tell
Shalini Balagopal
Yet another World Water Day went by on March 22, with politicians making the usual statements on the need to conserve this irreplaceable natural resource.
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