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O! Teacher, stop teaching
If I were asked to define the biggest challenge for the teacher, I would say, ‘It is to teach children how to deal with a world that we know nothing about.’ In such a world, imagination is the key resource that they will need. Without imagination they would be floundering trying to find answers in…
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Hyderabad Public School and other matters
We were taught to distinguish fact from fiction and allegory and to draw lessons. We also learned to laugh at ourselves and to have a good sense of humor. This seems to be in short supply currently with people taking themselves far too seriously and carrying their sense of offence on a hair trigger. Such…
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AMM-HSS – Turnaround story
I set some ground rules. I told them that if they identified a problem, I also wanted them to think it through and suggest a solution that we could apply. I didn’t want them to become ‘professional protestors’. I wanted them to become problem solvers. Whatever problem they mentioned would be their problem and who…
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Two mysteries – Teaching and Parenting
Our present methods of teaching which are inflicted on by far the vast majority of children the world over are the single biggest cause for killing the imagination that every child is born with and making them into square blocks which fit our own frightened, constrained and slavish worldview. Those who comply we ‘pass’ and…
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Is it a bird or is it a plane? Homeschooling concerns
Of late I, have been reading many articles on ‘Homeschooling’ – which term when written like this seems to have acquired the status of legitimacy instead of being wrong spelling. The need for a hyphen is apparently no longer felt. ‘Home’ and ‘School’ are evidently no longer two different places, either geographically, physically or emotionally.…
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Parenting can’t be outsourced
The biggest challenge of parenting is to accept that we are facing a world that is very different from the one we grew up in. This is true irrespective of which country you live in with the additional complexity of a rapid destruction of walls between cultures. The truth is that your solutions don’t work…