Principal's Blog

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past which are no longer relevant on a curriculum for today’s children.

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don’t think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: “Google is full of junk.”

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else’s work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.

The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of India says to me: “We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to.”

One of the teachers who works with me said to her class of nine-year-olds: “There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can’t see, can you figure out what it is?” The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups’ work and so on.

One of them says: “Aren’t we going to do any work?”

“What do you think you were doing?” asks the teacher.

“Learning about electromagnetism.”

“What’s work, then?”

“Work is when you say things to us and we write them down.”

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the “good old days”. It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Hotel is better than the best facilities in an emperor’s room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. “Where did language come from?”, “Why were the pyramids built?”, “Is life on Earth sustainable?”, “What is the purpose of theatre?”

Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. That’s a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

In this kind of self-organised learning, we don’t need the same teachers all the time. Any teacher can cause any kind of learning to emerge. A teacher does not need to be physically present, she could be a projected, life-sized image on the wall. A “Cloud” of such volunteer teachers have been operating out of the UK and a few other countries into schools in India and South America for more than five years, using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children. We don’t need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don’t need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated ”disciplines”, connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

Raising a Reader

Teachers build skills, but a parent’s top job is to nurture a love of books and words.
By Abby Margolis Newman

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve reading: hiding under the covers with a flashlight, reading well past bedtime; draped on the couch reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory while eating a Snickers bar as slowly as possible; the thrill of my first library card. My love for reading had been firmly established before I can even remember – largely due to the encouragement of my parents, who are both voracious readers. When I was around 10, I became obsessed with the Coffee, Tea or Me? books about stewardesses (remember, this was circa 1971; the term “flight attendant” wasn’t yet used) jetting around the world, having flings on every continent. My mother was horrified, but in principle couldn’t bring herself to stop me from reading, even if it was utter trash.

What does it mean for a child to be a reader – not just someone who can handle the mechanics of reading but one who craves books like a caffeine addict craves his daily Starbucks? “There is a huge difference between knowing how to read and being an avid reader,” says Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook. “We do a good job in schools at teaching kids how to read but we’ve forgotten to teach them to want to read.”

So how do we parents turn our children from novice or even struggling readers into kids (and later, adults) who will consistently turn to reading as a source of pleasure? There are several rules of thumb that the experts agree are building blocks to raising enthusiastic readers.

Rule number 1: It all starts with reading aloud. And reading aloud should start from birth, say the experts. “You cannot overestimate the importance of this,” says Betsy Rogers, a first- and second-grade teacher in Birmingham who is Alabama’s 2003 Teacher of the Year. The more words your child hears from the beginning of her life, Rogers says, the bigger her vocabulary will be – which will pave the way when she learns to read herself. As Trelease points out, “Listening comprehension comes before reading comprehension.”

Many parents make the mistake of no longer reading aloud once their children are able to read to themselves. Trelease argues that you should read aloud to your children well into middle school, using books that are two or three levels above those the kids can read themselves. In other words, if your first-grader is perfectly capable of reading The Cat in the Hat by himself, have him read it to you, then read a chapter book to him.

Rule number 2: Have plenty of books in the house. “Books should be integrated into your family’s life every day,” says Barbara Genco, president of the Association for Library Services to Children. Keep books in the bathroom, on the bedside table, in the backpack. Get your child a library card as soon as she is old enough, then take weekly or bi-weekly trips to the library. If the thought of frequent trips to Barnes & Noble sounds like a budget-buster, visit a used bookstore. However you choose to stock your house with books, doing so sends a strong message to your children that you value reading, which leads to:

Rule number 3: Model reading for your children by being a reader yourself. Make a point of reading a book or the newspaper while your children are in the room. “A child who never hears or sees a parent reading, but only sees that parent watching TV, will emulate that behavior,” says Trelease. Too much TV (according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than 10 hours a week) leads to underachievement in school. As your child gets older, look for areas of common interest and read together. If your preteen son is an athlete, read the sports section together or get him a subscription to a sports magazine (yes, says Trelease, magazines do count). This, says Genco, “creates a direct connection between what they love to do in life and reading.”

Rule number 4: Let your kids be in charge of what they read. Allow your kids to select their own books, even if they’re too easy, advises Genco. And it’s OK if she wants to read junk once in a while, as long as she’s reading a variety of things. Parents who try to exert too much control over the content of their kids’ reading risk fueling the perception that reading is a chore. Reading for pleasure, the experts agree, should be the ultimate goal. “If you have a struggling reader, and reading results in tears and arguments, don’t force it,” says Rogers. “Read to her instead.”

Another tactic that can be effective for children who are struggling with reading (or just beginning to get the hang of it): giving small rewards. “For these kids, reading is still work,” says Trelease, “and the only way to become a better reader is to do it more.” For frustrated or new readers, the intrinsic pleasure in reading just isn’t there yet, so it’s OK to offer extrinsic rewards, such as movie tickets, TV privileges, or even a dollar or two, in exchange for concentrated reading time. Trelease warns parents to keep it simple: “Don’t go overboard on the incentives, otherwise the reward becomes the goal and not the reading itself,” he advises.

Last year, when my older boys were in first and second grades, they read all the Captain Underpants and Junie B. Jones books. Even though, to my mind, Junie B.’s grammatical errors were like fingernails on a blackboard and the Captain Underpants books were barely a step up from comic books, I bit my tongue – at least they were reading. This school year, they’ve read all the Harry Potter books and Aaron, my second-grader, is working his way through the entire works of Roald Dahl. The other day, I spotted him slowly eating a Snickers bar while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I just had to smile.

Adapted from Scholastic.

Connecting learners in a global world: why is this important?

The 21st century will be a very different life experience for the current generation of children and young adults. Those born since 1980 will face global competition on a scale unimagined by previous generations.

In the decades ahead, the approximately 30 million people in India who have at least 20 years of their career ahead of them will have to compete with over a billion more people than their parents.

While not all of those people will be educated to the level of British citizens, there is a Red Army saying: ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’. China and India already have over 200 million primary and secondary school children, each, and they are investing to educate more.
Indian children will witness extraordinarily fast innovations in energy, clean-tech, green products, information technology, medicine, nano-tech, robotics and a host of new technologies not yet imagined. In 2009, more science is being conducted in more places around the world than ever before; those innovations may come from anywhere.

Today’s students will also experience incredibly rapid shifts in global economics as countries that make the right investments in education, entrepreneurship and advanced research create new products that spawn new companies that dominate global industries and that destroy old industries and old business models. Newspapers are dead; Western auto companies are on life support;China has become manufacturer to the world; India has created an IT centre of higher wage jobs.

Students in the 21st century must become more connected learners or they risk being uncompetitive adults in the work world, for two reasons: 1) knowledge is generated globally and unless students recognize that and are adept at accessing that knowledge they will fall behind; and 2) more countries will become potential customers, suppliers or competitors and students without a grasp of global history, culture, religion, languages and behavioral norms will be losers in the global economy.

Since the 1950s, Western countries led by the United States have dominated knowledge creation. The great universities of Europe and America along with the major industrial companies of the European Union and US produced the lion’s share of the world’s new knowledge and resulting new industries.

That hegemony has been broken in the past few decades as universities and companies in China, India, Korea, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia have been expanding their research and begun respecting intellectual property rights. Arguably some of the best scientific research being done today is conducted in universities and in laboratories in Asia or India.

This generation of children and young adults must be more global in their thinking and more aware of and comfortable with other cultures. Using the Internet – video, voice and text – to bring the world into OUR classrooms is imperative for children to become globally aware.

Connecting school children early in life with children in China, India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brazil and Russia will aid them in their understanding of the world, sharpen their language skills and serve them well as they enter the intense global competition for high-value, high-wage careers.

This is a big challenge which we are facing , as the professions of the future are unknown we need to develop these skills of collaboration among the students thus they learn more about different cultures and are ready to face the world wherever they may be doing business or in any profession.

I have a deep concern over the failure ratio of the students in our present schooling system. As per the survey 92% children leave schools before High school / intermediate and amongst the rest 85% are failures in life. I call them failure if they are not able to earn Rs. 20000/- i.e. USD 400 in a month.

Out of 20000 students giving board examination in a B class city with 1000 plus  schools of all levels ( KG, Primary, secondary and sr. Sec.) within the city, with Rs. 500 Crore coaching of IIT-JEE , AIPMT etc. only 10-15 get selected in IIT, NDA etc. then why there is so much burden on students from early stage for academics. What are so called GOOD schools doing? I feel they are just creating failures.

Amongst these 20000 students who appear for boards only 300 shall earn Rs. 20000/- in next 5 years and only another 2700-3000 shall earn more than this amount in their lifetime (amongst them 6-7 percent. are those whose parents are rich and give business, land, cash to their children), rest 85% shall never earn a healthy amount for better living in their lifetime. Take any school, corporate, govt. Organization etc. and you shall not find more than 15 percent people earning more than Rs. 20000/-

Let’s start working on this concern and make our children successful in their life. We have considered it as a mission  to take the education levels higher and make more and more successful students. Let’s try to leave the commercial implication in education and be true mentors and educators.

Let’s together learn and make our students learners and leaders for life. Talent development, Inquisitiveness, creative teaching, freedom environment, school with healthy atmosphere, life skills teaching etc. shall make successful students.

Your comments are welcome to make things better …………………

To Improve Your Performance

It is never too late to develop great study habits. If you’re starting a new school year, or you just want to improve your grades and school performance, take a look at this list of good habits and start making some changes in your routine.

1. Write Down Every Assignment
The most logical place to write down your assignments is in a planner, but you might prefer to keep a to-do list in a simple notebook or in your cell phone note pad. It doesn’t really matter what tool you use, but it is absolutely essential to your success to write down every single assignment, due date, test date, and task.

2. Remember to Bring Your Homework to School
It sounds simple enough, but many F’s come from students forgetting to bring a perfectly good paper to school with them. Does your homework have a home? Is there a special place where you always put your paperwork each night? To avoid forgetting your homework, you must establish a strong homework routine with a special homework station where you work each night. Then you must get in the habit of putting your homework where it belongs right after you finish it, whether this is in a special folder on your desk or in your backpack.

3. Communicate With Your Teacher
Every successful relationship is built upon clear communication. A student-teacher relationship is no different. Miscommunication is another one of those factors that can cause bad grades, despite good efforts on your part. At the end of the day, make sure you understand every assignment that’s expected of you. Imagine getting a bad grade on a 5-page paper because you didn’t understand the difference between an expository essay and a personal essay.
Be sure to ask questions and find out what format you should use when you write a paper or what type of questions might appear on your history exam. The more questions you ask, the more prepared you’ll be.

4. Organize With Color
Devise your own color-coding system to keep your assignments and your thoughts organized. You may select a single color for each class (like science or history) and use that color for your folder, your highlighters, your sticky notes, and your pens. You’ll be surprised to discover how much strong organization skills can change your life!
Color-coding is also a tool to use when conducting research. For example, you should always keep several colors of sticky flags on hand when you’re reading a book for school. Assign a specific color the every topic of interest. Place a flag on a page containing information you will need to study or to cite. It works like magic!
5. Establish a Study Zone at Home
Take the time to assess your individual style and your real needs and plan for the perfect study place. After all, if you can’t concentrate, you certainly can’t expect to learn very well. Students are different. Some need a completely quiet room free from interruptions when they study, but others actually study better listening to quiet music in the background or taking several breaks.
Find a place to study that fits your specific personality and learning style. Then stock your study space with school supplies that will help you avoid last-minute emergencies.
6. Prepare Yourself for Test Days
You know that it’s important to study for test days, right? But there are other things you should consider in addition to the actual material that the test will cover. What if you show up for test day and the room is freezing cold? For many students, this would cause enough of a distraction to interrupt concentration. That leads to bad choices and bad answers. Plan ahead for heat or cold by layering your clothing.
And what happens when you spend so much time on one essay question that you don’t have enough time to finish the exam? Another way to prepare for test day is to take a watch and be mindful of time management.
7. Know Your Dominant Learning Style
Many students will struggle in a subject without understanding why. Sometimes this is because students don’t understand how to study in a way that matches their brain style.
Auditory learners are those who learn best through hearing things. Visual learners retain more information when they use visual aids, and tactile learners benefit by doing hands-on projects.
Every student should examine and evaluate their habits and their natural tendencies and decide how they might be able to improve their study habits by tapping into their personal strengths.
8. Take Fabulous Notes
There are a few tricks to taking fabulous notes that really help when it comes to studying. If you’re visual person, you should make as many doodles on your paper as you can. Useful doodles, that is. As soon as you realize that once topic relates to another, comes before another, is the opposite of another, or has any kind of connection to another—draw a picture that makes sense to you. Sometimes the information will not sink in until and unless you see it in an image.
There are also certain code words to look out for in a lecture that can indicate that your teacher is giving you the relevance or the context of an event. Learn to recognize key words and phrases that your teacher deems important.
9. Conquer Procrastination
When you put things off a lot, you end up putting things off until it’s too late from time to time. It’s that simple. When you procrastinate, you take the chance that nothing will go wrong at the last minute–but in the real world, things do go wrong.
So how can you battle the urge to put things off? Start with trying to recognize that a feisty little voice that lives inside every one of us. It tells us it would be more fun to play a game, eat, or watch TV when we know better. Don’t fall for it!
10. Take Care of Yourself
Some of your personal habits might be affecting your grades. Are you feeling tired, achy, or bored when it comes to homework time? You can change your grades by practicing a few healthy homework habits. Change the way you feel by taking better care of your mind and your body.
For example, between text messaging, Sony PlayStations, Xbox, Internet surfing, and computer writing, students are using their hand muscles in all new ways, and they’re growing increasingly susceptible to the hazards of repetitive stress injury. Find out how to avoid pain in your hands and neck by changing the way you sit at your computer