September 2007 – Teacher Plus

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

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

Inspecting Insects

Sheel
Learning by doing is a cliché today; and yet, one can breathe new life into it constantly.

Science of Colour

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.

May the Best Man Win

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

Beyond Tokenism

Ho-hum. Another Teachers’ Day has come…and gone. In some schools, children perhaps dress up in adult clothes and pretend to take charge of classes for a day. In others, the children entertain their teachers with song, dance and drama. There are gifts and speeches of appreciation, and for a day, the teacher takes centre stage. Then the day passes, like so many others, and everything goes back to normal. Teachers go back to the daily grind in dusty classrooms filled with children who resent them, parents who expect them to deliver the world and more at low cost, and school administrations that make the process of teaching a burden. So is Teachers’ Day then just another token, a meaningless symbol without substance? This could lead us to the deeper question of whether such commemorative days really have any role to play, apart from providing a welcome break from the routine. Teachers’ Day is celebrated in several countries, on different days, and in honour of different people. In China, for instance, it used to be observed on August 27, which is thought to be Confucius’ birthday. In other countries like Turkey and Iran, the choice of day is more political than cultural. In the United States the first Tuesday of the second full week in May is dedicated to teachers. In some countries it is a celebration that takes place on a school day while in others it is a national holiday. Whatever the form, the basic purpose remains the same; to officially recognize the role teachers play in shaping individuals and therefore society. Official recognition and tokenism apart, can we use Teachers’ Day as an advocacy opportunity to better working conditions, to bring attention to not only the difficult conditions within which teaching happens, but to larger issues of education and schooling and their relationship with the creation of a healthy society? For this to happen, the day must move away from notional awards and speeches to more pointed action and reflection on sharply defined issues. Organisations and associations concerned with school education and its mechanisms must come together as advocates and find common cause. If the education system in the country is to change, the demand must come from society – represented by parents – and driven by the system – represented by teachers. So why not begin now?

Reclaiming Shiksha

Manish Jain “Real democracy is not about being able to choose one’s rulers. Real democracy starts with being able to choose one’s teachers.” – Dayal Chand Soni (adapted from Mewari language) My family and I have made a decision not to send our daughter to school, either in India or abroad. Instead, Kanku (age 5) and we are learning together. As teachers working within the education system, you may be wondering why we took such a decision and how we are supporting our daughter’s learning. In this short essay, I will try to share some of the reasons behind our decision and the very practical actions we are taking to support Kanku in choosing her own gurus and weaving her own learning web. What’s wrong with schooling? We made our decision before Kanku was even born. For years, I had been working in the field of international education, and I had come to understand some very disturbing things about schooling. Of course, there are the oft-heard complaints: irrelevance, too much pressure on children, heavy bags, overloaded curriculum, corporal punishment, too many tuitions, etc. But, I had been looking deeper than these usual official suspects into the hidden curriculum of schooling. I saw that what school fundamentally does is disconnect us – from nature, from physical work, from our hands, from our families and communities, from our local languages, from our wisdom, and from real world issues. In sucking away children’s time, forcing them to regurgitate decontextualised information, and keeping them trapped in a box all day, schools kill their sensitivity, innate propensity for cooperation, multiple intelligences, spontaneous curiosity and imagination. They create fragmented and hypocritical minds – people who are unable to see beyond black and white disciplinary categories and roles; people who cannot relate their selfproclaimed beliefs and values with their actions; people who fear experimenting with the unknown.1 In other words, the perfect modern babus. Schooling – with its precise system of sorting, ranking and labelling children has created a modern social hierarchy that is far worse than the caste system. So much to the point, that people who do not know how to read or write or who have not gone to school are treated with contempt and made to feel invisible. Their children who attend school for the first time are obnoxiously labeled ‘first generation learners’; thus, negating all the learning that they and their ancestors have been engaged in for thousands of years. Such is the arrogance of today’s educationists.

Category: September 2007

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

Baking… & ‘Breaking’ Bread

Inspecting Insects

Science of Colour

May the Best Man Win

Beyond Tokenism

Reclaiming Shiksha

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