Learn-Develop-Grow

Every year, when the dust settles, my philosophical self starts thinking about the craziness of the preceeding weeks. What, I hear you ask, could this dust settling be about? And it's not yet Christmas. I refer to the euphoria and madness of producing the stage show at the Dalhousie Institute every year. Read on. Leave your comments. Share the link. We have a Christmas Carols Evening every year before Christmas.  It's a festival on its own. For several years now, I have been in the thick of things.  The stage performance is followed by the signature Barbecue dinner with choices of chicken, pork, beef and vegetables!  But "the play's the thing" as Shakespeare would have said.  Over the last few years, excepting the pandemic years, we have produced some pretty interesting programmes which make up for the shortfall in perfection by an powerful outpouring of emotion. Here's a peek behind the scenes of some of the earlier productions.  And an inside view of how it

  The Indian Express Front Page Every year since 1984, when the date October 31 comes around, I feel I should pen down my thoughts on that fateful day which tested my abilities as a young teacher.  And every year, I let it pass as though it never happened to anyone but me. But this year, a former student of mine, Shivaji Dasgupta, wrote a piece in the online magazine at  https://www.newsdrum.in/opinion/the-day-nehrus-daughter-died . I wrote back to him telling him about how I felt and he insisted I write.  So here it is.   I put it into this blog - Learn Develop Grow - because I think it formed a bit of all three on that fateful day. Just another Day Another October day in my sixth year of teaching at St Xavier's began as usual.  I am sure through the fuzziness of memories long gone, there must have been the usual classroom tricks and tantrums, the occasional unit test and a few jokes as only schoolboys know how.  Towards the afternoon there was this rumour floating around that the

  [The poster above popped into my WhatsApp feed this morning and two things got me hooked immediately.  The speaker, Anita Brooks , is an amazing educationist who is known to manage an entire school, one kid at a time, successfully.  The topic - The Power of Effective Questioning in Classrooms - has always been one of my favourite songs to sing when I work with teachers.  In fact, one of my sessions in my teacher-training programmes is called, as in the title, Questions are the Answer. Side benefits for carving out a little time in a boring, stay-home day include the fact that Anita is a very close family friend of ours, the Principal of Delhi Public International School, and also that EdTalks sounds a little like Ted Talks which has its own brand value.  You can watch the 32 min video here ]   Speed of Light and Sound Let me be my own despicable self and criticize the technology first, before I get into the happy job of analysing the content.  I discovered why some people think tha

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay There's something to be said for what you think is a lost cause.  If you can't do anything about it, at least raise a laugh - a joyful belly laugh or a nervous whimper or a knowing snigger - there are choices aplenty for those who will squeeze fun out of anything and lemonade out of lemons. The Lying Kind "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics!" these lines attributed to Mark Twain, among many other contenders since the 1850s, got me thinking about the connection with what we are doing with numbers, kids and even schools these days. Actually we have probably been doing it since Mark Twain's time too which might have prompted him to opine, "Never let school interfere with your education."  We have been reducing the kids to performance statistics, perhaps preparing them for performance appraisals in corporate life? 98% of our students have scored 90% or more says one institution 100% success rate!  sa

  [This is a post published on December 3, 2020 under Mentor Posts on the website of Cygnus Centre of Excellence https://cygnuscoeonline.com/ .  This is re-posted here with permission. The efforts of Cygnus COE to make a difference in the world of teaching and learning is commendable.  Please do visit their website, check out their various sections and leave feedback.  And, if you like, please share and comment on this blogpost.] “I can’t attend the program on Saturday or Sunday because we have webinars on those days, every week!”  – this from a teacher who works Mondays to Fridays on her online classes. Weekends?  Who needs them?  This is lockdown, we don’t have weekends, nowhere to go! The teacher’s phone rings at 11:45 p.m. Nearly midnight.  It’s the Coordinator.   “We need to discuss the program for tomorrow morning”.  Wait, that’s less than eight hours from now – and even less, as the call continues for 45 minutes. After the call, the paperwork begins. Texting at the table, a teac

Photo by Yanalya - Freepik.com [Tonight's blog post is not about money, honey.  It's about systematic investment planning in Online Etiquette - something where I can't predict growth and sustainability, but I can pretend that it's a value proposition especially in these days of WFH and online conferencing.] Wake up call Imagine my surprise when I glanced through half-open eyelids at my list of e-mails early in the morning.  Guilty as hell about checking my phone before I get out of bed, I give it a quick glance before locating my spectacles.  And so, the surprise when I saw a mail from the Bank that apparently read "Start an SIP in Etiquette".  It didn't.  On closer look, through refracted rays, I read it again.  It was boringly predictable - Start an SIP in Equities, it said.  I clicked Delete and it sailed into the virtual bin. But then this got me thinking.  With the enforced use of technology and everything going either "online" or "e-