Learning for Life

/0 Comments/in , , , /by
Hungry birds have always been a problem for farmers. Sometimes the birds eat so much corn or wheat that a farmer and his family would not have enough food to last through the winter. So, for more than 3000 years, farmers have been making scarecrows.

But the ones made here at Atmiya Vidya Mandir were erected by the class of 4th division with the help of their Gujarati Language teacher. These students have a poetry on scarecrows in their coursework/syllabus and for the introduction of the poem their teacher built a scare crow in the neem garden on the campus. When the children saw the scarecrow they said it would be very difficult for somebody to build one, but were positively challenged by their teacher to build their own. Under the guidance of the teacher the students together built the first prototype. The students were then divided into teams who created many other such Scarecrows. It seemed that the little champions erected these bogeyman’s to protect their beloved neem trees.

Confucius once said ‘You hear and you forget you see and you remember you do and you understand’.

Each child in this class now remembers the poem and even if they forget the lines, they have understood the meaning and importance of scarecrows for life.

Learning at Atmiya Vidya Mandir happens round the clock. A typical Science class for 8th standard on a particular day began at 9:54 pm on the terrace of the new school building. 42 students of class 8th with their teacher observed the moon through a telescope magnified at 160 X zoom and experienced beautiful craters on the moon. The curiosity of the students then rose to such an extent that they wanted to explore more and some said they wanted to find their own K-Pax. To challenge these inspirers the science teacher gave them a project and asked them to select any celestial object in the solar system – planet, satellite, comet, asteroid anything in the solar system and asked them to inform him why they were interested in that object. But he also made them think by asking a critical thinking question that if their research team is funded by our dear Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh with Rs 10,000 crore for their project what would they do?
All the teams did impressive research work and some of their original ideas are as follows:

  1. Setting up an Internet hub on Mars with a telecommunication satellite hovering over Mars.
  2. Sending plants and insect samples on Mars and see how life if any is affected on the planet.
  3. Coating their Venus Exploration spacecraft with platinum so the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus does not bother their mission.
  4. Young authors – this group started writing fiction – they said they went to Mercury and found a dead alien which they brought back to earth and are now going to spend the money on doing research on the alien. (X-files Returns – what will Scully and Moulder do?)
  5. Creating drilling equipment for their Mission to Europa (one of Jupiter’s many moons) so that they could drill easily through the frozen surface and will check if there is life under the ice sheets there!

It is said that Ye can lead a man to university but you cannot make a man think. But can you say the same about the children of Atmiya Vidya Mandir?

Empowering the leaders of tomorrow today.

/0 Comments/in , , /by
It is being proclaimed on the Indian Government website of Department of Science and Technology that today India is one of the top ranking countries in the competitive economy especially in the field of research. However it is said on the same website that we need to embark on some major science projects which have relevance of national needs and which will also be relevant for tomorrow’s technology.
This means we will need a few more Nandan Nilekani’s in India, who currently is the Chairman of the Identification Authority of India. On his blog and in his book, he describes that this project will give each Indian a unique identification number which in turn will enable direct benefits, and fixing weak public delivery systems, giving the poor access to better healthcare, education and welfare safety nets.
One of the leading Scientists of India, Padmashree and Padmabhushan awardee Dr Raghunath Mashelkar while talking to school children at a reputed school in Mumbai highlighted top five attributes of success:
1. Believe in yourself.
2. When you fail, do not go into depression and when you succeed you keep your feet firmly rooted to the ground.
3. There is no substitute to hard work.
4. Positivism, it matters more in the case of leadership. That way you can get extraordinary work done from ordinary people. There is an extraordinary spark in every individual and you should know how to tap it.
5. Believe in teamwork. Individuals can achieve little what a team can. You therefore should build effective teams and guide them to success.
He also said that the gap between academics and industry in India is quite high. What does industry do? It converts knowledge into money and academia converts money into knowledge. Every evolving society needs to strike a balance between these two and the balance will make the society richer in terms of both money and knowledge. In the western countries we find no gap between academic scientific research and industry and therefore we see how advanced they are in terms of knowledge and both application of science.
So what children in 21st century need is more than academics and the top attributes as highlighted by Dr Mashelkar believe in oneself, Leadership, Positive Attitude, Teamwork and Team Building.
The teachers, staff and management of Atmiya Vidya Mandir are aware of these current societal needs and have been imparting these values in children since the inception of our school and thus empowering the leaders of tomorrow, today.

Where’s the teacher?

/0 Comments/in , /by

The global meltdown may have hit India, but one sector that has weathered the storm so far is school education. No other country perhaps displays such a wide range of school within the system. There is the government sector with it’s municipal schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas and non government sector with its playschools in larger cities, missionery schools and finally top- end private schools, last but not least conventional public schools.
These all schools have one thing in common, they are desperately crying out for teachers. We may have our periodic overabundance of doctors, engineers, MBAs and IT professionals, but we never seem to have enough teachers. Though everyone knows that the bedrock of any country is its education system but no one is unduly concerned about this glaring lacuna. Little wonder that we are docile or better say paying a heavy price in terms of the quality of our leadership.
This pitiful state of affairs (teaching profession) has much to do with the way we, as a nation, view the teaching profession. Teachers are not considered frontline professionals in the same manner as, doctors, lawyers or engineers. It is believed that anyone irrespective of qualifications or training can teach. And that is exactly what happens. From the village schoolmaster who could be a labour contractor (teaching when time permits) or a disheartened chap who has found teaching as the last option as a breadwinner, to the bored or desperate urban housewife who is more eager to earn something rather than contribute, teaching is open to all. Add the fact, it is a relatively poorly paid profession, and you have a deadly mix (various and ambiguous reasons to join teaching). Teaching then generally becomes the domain of the ‘bored’ or ‘failed’ individual. This is not to suggest that we do not have some of the world’s finest teachers. Ranging from NGOs to private schools we have extremely competent and motivated teachers. But when you consider India’s billion one population, their number appears disappointing.
Another area of concern is the dwindling number of men in the profession. It seems all the men have hopped off to greener pastures (the other so called luring or challenging vocation). The IT sector has recently claimed a larger number. While women do make great teachers but they also have the role of homemaker. Being a teacher for a woman is not as professional as, say being a corporate executive. And the men, who remain, have largely embedded themselves in the tuition market, as opposed to being genuine mentors as school teachers. The most sensitive issue in this sector is there are no top-of-the-line teacher’s training institutions, certainly not one of the statures of a St. Stephen’s and IIT or IIM. What we do have is an excess of ‘fly-by-night’ B.Ed courses, in most cases not worth the paper the degree is printed on (mostly in Bhopal and in U.P). Nothing in the higher education scenario will attract bright young boys and girls to enroll for a teacher-training course. Yet all we can do is to talk of increasing the number of IITs and IIMs!
Career growth in teaching profession is also very slow. Surprisingly, not too many teachers today aspire to be principals. Women feel it puts too much strain in their role as homemakers: men feel the seat is not worth the trouble it brings. Moreover, the system does not provide for any systematic grooming of principals. Most are there either by accident or ‘teachers on promotion’, certainly not as a result of some long term scientific plan. So where does one go as a teacher? Becoming a head of the department may well be the end of the road for most. The profession itself suffers from a sense of low self esteem. Teachers do not see themselves in the same category as lawyers, doctors, civil servants or engineers. How many of us are being proud as teachers? Are we less than those engineers who construct building while we construct future of the nation? Are we less than those doctors who are to stand guard against fatal diseases while we are to safe guard our society against social hitch (through making students a better individual). Do we need to be less proud than an IAS who governs and deals with state affairs; whereas we direct the thought process of a child who can be tomorrow’s Vivekanand or Sardar patel. We are no less than an industrialist who manufactures the most expensive product as we are in the exertion of MAKING OF MAHATMAS. What do you think friends? How noble but vulnerable this profession is? It is nothing apologetic about being teachers. The irony is that we are still supposed to be the epitome of all that is noble and good. A redefinition of our attitude to the profession is highly required.

Submitted by: Seema Joshi