May the (Knowledge of) Force be with You

Last year, my then 10 yo daughter changed schools. Her new school used the much-tougher ICSE books even though they were officially a CBSE school. This year, we shifted her to another branch of the same school that was closer to home.

 

This one being a brand new branch, all the students were new to the school. So the first couple of days, the teachers tried to get a feel of how much the kids knew - after all, since everyone came from a different school, there was no common knowledge level that the teachers could assume. In Physics, the teacher tried testing the waters by asking questions about force.

 

I remember being very impressed by the way ICSE books taught force from my daughter’s previous year. The explanation started by describing what a force could do to an object (change its speed, change its direction, change it shape etc). It then went into the ways forces could act – via contact, and without contact. It named and described the different forces, from push/pull to springs to friction to magnetic to electrical forces. It described very nice experiments to explain the characteristics of forces e.g. a magnet under a table could move a toy car on the table, proving magnetism could act through certain materials. The next chapter was an in-depth look at one force in particular – friction. The chapter after that was on magnetism. (As someone who grew up on CBSE books, those were I-wish-I’d-been-taught-like-this moments for me).

 

Back to the Physics teacher’s question on force. I was amused my daughter came home saying most of the kids in her class seemed dumb as they knew next to nothing about forces! Unlike you, Miss Newton, they probably learnt via CBSE books, I was tempted to say (But I didn’t). Though the positive thing is that it showed that she did remember enough from last year to spot what the others didn’t know.

 

If even a 11 yo can remember stuff in subjects like Physics long after the exam is over, that’s yet more proof that the ICSE way of teaching is superior.

 

P.S. A couple of days later, my daughter came back with another triumphant tale – the Biology class had shown that only 4 kids knew about ‘cells’. Are all four from other branches of your school, I asked pointedly. No, she said, one of them is from XYZ school. Aha, I thought, that’s an ICSE school too. I rest my case.

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