August 2009 – Teacher Plus

A case for neighbourhood schools

Shankar Musafir The ‘neighbourhood criteria’ has environmental, economic and social ramifications Admission to the nursery classes in most schools in Delhi has been a controversial issue. Added to this, the B K Ganguly Committee Report on nursery admissions has also caused a huge uproar. The committee was formed on the recommendation of the Delhi High Court to review a petition1 against interviewing parents at the time of admissions to nursery school. The private school fraternity and many parents are not happy about it. But there is at least one important point in the report which will make environmentalists/educationists happy. A section of the report has to do with a child’s residence near the school as a criterion for admission – ‘the neighbourhood criterion’. Initially, the report mentioned 3 km as the radius that the school should consider. After protests from parents and schools this radius was increased. Nevertheless, this condition makes a lot of sense, environmentally. Every school invariably finds itself surrounded by vehicles both the school transport and private vehicles twice daily – when the school opens and when it closes. The reason – most students commuting to school use either the school bus or their private vehicles. With the ‘blue line fiasco’2, failure of public transport and increasing affluence among people, the number of parents dropping their kids to school has increased. The result is an increase in the number of traffic jams outside schools. As transport planners have been saying, more people should use public transport. A bus can carry more passengers than a car and occupies less space. This means that there will be less traffic and congestion on the roads. Not bad advice at all! More children need to use public or school buses rather than create traffic jams by using their own cars. But this is not merely a traffic problem. A study by the Central Institute of Road Transport, Pune, finds that a car consumes nearly six times more energy per passenger per km than an average bus. Hence, public transport makes sense even from the point of view of saving fuel. These days children travel enormous distances to reach their schools and get back home. Not only does the fuel spent impact the environment through emissions, there are many limitations unaccounted for. The time taken to travel eats into a child’s time to play. The child when he comes back home only has enough time to finish homework. This is stressful and has a negative impact on

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.

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!

Is reading an ability or a skill?

K Lakshmi Rao
Reading habits among children are on the decline, in part thanks to the television and the computer.

All about carbon

Srijaya Char
Carbon is one of those elements known to man since prehistoric times, in the form of charcoal and soot.

The Ramanujan museum for math

S Sundaram and Nirmala Raman PK Srinivasan, or PKS as he was known, was a dreamer with his head in the world of mathematics but feet fi rmly on the ground. He was an ardent admirer and practically a devotee of the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. This is what he wrote in a preface to Volume 1 of the Ramanujan Memorial Number: Letters and Reminiscences he helped publish in 1968; “(the dream is to set up a) Ramanujan Memorial Foundation with the object of setting up a permanent memorial to Ramanujan in the shape of a multistoried building in Madras, housing a planetarium, mathematical exhibition wings, auditorium, library and showrooms displaying applications of mathematics in industry. It will be a house of entertainment par excellence for the layman and it will strive to make mathematics almost as popular as dance and music. We solicit generous support and help from the readers and institutions all over the globe for translation of the dream into reality.” He had to wait for almost 25 years to atleast have a room for the memorabilia of this great mathematician and finally could accommodate it in the premises of the Avvai Cultural Academy, Royapuram, and the man who helped him realise his dream, at least partially, was Shri A.T.B Bose, a businessman interested in education. The story of PKS’s fascination with Ramanujan and how he came to collect letters and other memorablia related to Ramanujan and how these came to be housed in the Ramanujan Museum in Chennai is a story worth recounting if only to show the power of dreams and a single-minded devotion to a cause. PKS was introduced to the life and works of Ramanujan in 1948 through a book on “Indian Scientists’ published by G A Natesan & Co. The life sketch of Ramanujan moved him and created in him a desire to discover more about the genius. At that time, PKS was working as a mathematics teacher in Muthialpet High School in Chennai. Through his innovative methods of teaching, PKS managed to kindle an interest in mathematics amongst his students. PKS felt that Ramanujan’s life taught you that it was possible to reach great heights of achievement irrespective of your background if only you are true to yourself. This was something he wanted all his students to realise. He was one of the founder members of the Association of Mathematics Teachers in India (AMTI) in 1965 because of a conviction that mathematics teachers needed to

A close look at snakes

Romulus Whitaker
India is a land of many awe-inspiring and fascinating reptiles and amphibians – from king cobras that can stand up and look you in the eye, to frogs that glide from tree to tree.

Class room to learn

Sneha Reddy Classroom – the word conjures up an image of desks in pencil-straight lines, with aisles just wide enough to hold a supervising adult. A blackboard at the far end, the sharp answer-ready front benchers in the front rows and the talkative troublemakers in the back, with the forgotten averages in between. Is this the way it has to be? What does classroom seating arrangement have to do with how we experience the teaching/learning space? Teacher Plus explores… During a normal school day, a student spends about six hours within a classroom. For every hour spent learning new things, good health and state of mind have always been accepted factors that influence performance. However, during these six hours of school, performance is hugely impacted by how the student is seated in the classroom. Studies show that students get influenced by how far they are from the teacher, by the view from their seat and also by who is seated next to them. Classroom seating arrangements are always situational, and requirements vary all the time. The type of furniture and space constraints in a typical Indian classroom do not always allow for much flexibility, but the resourceful teacher may be able to find ways to vary seating arrangements – for example, by taking the children outside the class when different arrangements would work better. For instance, a group discussion amongst students requires a “cluster” arrangement while a collaborative discussion demands a “semi-circular” arrangement. Each of them contributes to the levels of learning. This article gives an insight into different seating arrangements and how they can be best used to provide children with appropriate proximity from the point of action, proper ventilation, illumination, maximum comfort, and keep clear of classroom traffic. It is surprising to see how a simple change in seating arrangement can soak in all the distraction and transform the mood of a session. The individual and group characteristics of students in a class also impact the requirements. So, by merging what we know about our students with the ideal physical environment we can maximize teaching and learning efficiency. There are many seating arrangements that teachers can use. Some common arrangements are cluster, desk rows, table rows, semi- circle, pairs and centers or activity zones. In India, the conventional “desk rows” have been in use for decades. This is because of the need to accommodate a large number of students in every class. “With a large strength, changes in the seating arrangement become very

Category: August 2009

A case for neighbourhood schools

What’s in a name?

Listen while you learn

Will the sweeping reforms sweep through?

Is reading an ability or a skill?

All about carbon

The Ramanujan museum for math

A close look at snakes

Class room to learn

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