Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There’s the regular meaning of the word, “savage”. And then there’s the other meaning of the word: “When something or someone is "savage," it is "viciously cool.”   When a kid in class asked my 11 yo daughter’s English teacher to move a bit (so he could copy what she’d written on the blackboard), she snapped back, “If I move away from the board, who will write the words you are copying?”. Methinks she did have a valid point.   Another time, in the same teacher’s class, some kid announced (without rhyme or reason) that he was a nerd. The girl next to him asked, “What is a nerd?”. Upon which, this genius said he didn’t know either! The teacher decided to educate the class on the meaning of the word. “A nerd”, she said, “is a kid who thinks they know everything, takes out their book, and then keeps staring at the teacher instead of looking at the book”.   Continuing in the spirit of things, a girl then proved she wasn’t a nerd by declaring that she couldn’t f...

Long, long ago, when I was still at school, teachers didn’t just frown upon kids in the same school being boy/girlfriends, they actively tried to shoot it down. The intention was understandable – given how competitive the environment is, it’s best you focus on academics for now, and not get distracted by other things. There’s always time for all that after 12 th …   In today’s world though, one never knows what will go viral on WhatsApp/ Twitter/ Facebook if teachers did something like that. Freedom of choice. It’s his/her life. Stick to your job, i.e., teaching. Stop being the moral police…   I realized that when my 11 yo daughter mentioned that a boy in her class dropped a folded piece of paper accidentally. The teacher picked it up, opened it, found it was a love letter to a girl in the class, and read it aloud (I guess the teacher was not one of those who believed in asking the dreaded, rhetorical question – “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class...

Alan Jacobs banned laptops (and other internet-enabled devices) from his class. His reason was that his students were getting distracted. My instinctive reaction was to disagree with him: shouldn't he accept the reality of the ubiquitous connected device and adapt his teaching to align with them? Who refers to a book after college anyway (except for ultra-specialized topics)? Don't we just dip into the perfect recall of Google? Then recently, at work, I found it better to learn a new field (pneumatics and mechanical engineering) by taking notes on a book than on my laptop. The laptop was distracting me with every new mail and message. Clay Shirky sums it up perfectly: “Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting.” On the other hand, aren't many teachers bad at teaching? Did any of us ever learn anything from those teachers even in the pre-connected-device-in-every-pocket era? But Shirky brings out a point I hadn't realized (even though it was right under my nos...