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 pus...