The Pedagogy Puzzle

Snippets from a recent work trip to Udaipur that touched me in different ways... Lal An elderly man approached the curb in his white Maruti Dzire. The license plate confirmed that this was my reserved Uber ride with Lal from Maharana Pratap Airport to the hotel. As we headed west towards the city, Lal and I struck up a conversation set against the idyllic backdrop of the Aravalli hills cloaked in the rays of the evening sun. When I told him that I work in the education sector, his eyes lit up! It turned out that he worked with Seva Mandir in the early 2000s for around 5 years in classrooms as a volunteer teacher. Once he got to know that I taught for 3 years in Pune, he animatedly began describing his classroom experiences! ☺️ He shifted to driving cabs as a profession because the volunteer teacher role didn't pay him enough to support his family and he didn't possess the necessary educational qualifications to rise up the ranks there. 😥 The passion with which he spoke about...

On printing my boarding pass at the airport in Ahmedabad, I realised that my flight was delayed by an hour and now scheduled to take off at 9:10 p.m. A silver lining was that I was there with some colleagues who had flights to other cities. So, I could get in some informal time with them! 😄 Oddly, though the boarding time was 8:25 p.m., a final call announcement rang out at around 8:25 p.m. itself. After bidding adieu to my colleagues, I entered the plane with a glimmer of hope that the delay might not be much after all! 😅 In a few minutes, boarding was completed and I expected that we'd begin taxiing soon. 9:10 p.m. came and went. A palpable sense of restlessness began to set in with a few passengers questioning the crew about the reason for the delay. A doctor, who was travelling with his wife and 2-year-old son, told the crew that he had surgeries lined up next morning and needed to get home to sleep! 9:40 p.m. - we were still parked in the bay with no sign of reversing out to...

We were 75 minutes into class and her engagement and grasp of the content was wonderful! 😊 She had, with minimal guidance, derived the formula for the length of an arc of a circle by applying proportional reasoning. When a student makes a cross-topic connection like this, it is rewarding!  😇  Now, we were solving questions to cement her understanding of the concept. We reached the last question in the set: The second hand of a clock is 10 cm long. How far does the tip of the second hand travel in 20 seconds? She racked her brains for close to 10 minutes before concluding that she was stumped! 😵 I asked her to share where she was getting stuck. She replied that she didn't know the speed at which the hand was moving - so, she couldn't find the distance that the tip had travelled. I realised that she was thinking of the {speed = distance ÷ time} formula. So, I gave her a hint that knowing the speed at which the hand was moving wasn't required in this case. In addition, I...

My post on happiness  was inspired by a cover story published in The Week  - a magazine that I've subscribed to for years now. This post owes its origins to The Week cover story on Dr. S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Authored by correspondent Mr. Nirmal Jovial, it paints a nuanced picture of how Somanath became one of ISRO's most influential leaders and drove the creation of some of India's path-breaking rockets and missions. Here, I will examine how two aspects - upbringing and community - influenced his journey. (Note: This article is not available online so I have picked out relevant extracts from the physical copy of the magazine.)

I admit I was curious. That's what led me to install a dating app in the first place... Some say that curiosity killed the cat. After all, I was plunging into uncharted territory here... Thankfully, after more than a year, I'm not that cat! In fact, I've been lucky to meet some truly wonderful women... What have I learned through this roller coaster of a ride? Here's an attempt at synthesising it all...