Taking the easy way out on a tired Friday evening, here is another video, more intended to please grandparents than anybody else.
Blog Archives
Fearless Climber
Posted on October 16, 2011
In Golden Gate Park, the oldest public playground in the US, there is a tall climbing structure, almost 30 feet high. On summer afternoon, Maya decided to climb it. P.S: This entry is a shameless plug by a parent about the exploits of his daughter. Read more »
Maya Starts Biking
Posted on August 22, 2011
The second day she got on a bike with pedals on it, Maya started biking.
Read more »
Starry, Starry Night
Posted on June 4, 2011
What child is not fascinated by the night sky ? If I ever want to feel a tingling in my spine, all I have to do is look at the night sky, even in this light polluted suburban land. As a teenager, I longed to own a telescope, something that was just not possible in the time and place I lived in. I spent a few nights lying outside in the garden, staring at the sky through a binoculars that had somehow come my way. I tried to decipher the constellations and make out interesting patterns. I didn’t succeed much. A decade or so ago, I was in Australia, on Kangaroo Island. I had gone out at night to see the penguins as they returned to land. The power went off and the whole island was plunged into darkness. The night sky in that darkness is imprinted in my mind. There was a large band of light that seemed to split the sky, the Milky Way. When I got an iPhone, the first app that I bought was Starwalk, an app that helped me make sense of the night sky.
Today morning, I came across this beautiful time-lapse video of the Milky Way, taken by a South Dakota farmer and photographer. I loved it so much, I had to write a brief entry about it. As someone said, we can’t help being struck by the night sky, after all, we’re all made of stardust.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Schooling and Education: Part 1
Posted on May 8, 2011
Everything I’m good at is self-taught. Just about everything I’m terrible at is what I learned in school. I was struck by this thought a few weeks back.
Maya starts preschool in a few weeks. We’ll test the waters by sending her to preschool two mornings a week. Maya has been canvassing to go to school since about six months or so. When she learnt that neither Shanthala nor I can be with her at school, her enthusiasm flagged a bit before picking up again. What kind of school do we want to send her to ? That question has been on our mind for the past six months or so. I kept hitting the snooze button every time the thought popped up.
All Shanthala and I were certain of was that given our location, it had to be a private school, at least till middle school. Neighbors who had sent their first kid to the local public school, shied away from them for their next batch. The elementary schools have gotten really bad, we heard. So, what kind of private school ? Things were easy for my parents. They just looked for a reputed English medium school and preferably that had the words “Convent” in their name somewhere. Shanthala and I agreed that we didn’t any place that was a pressure cooker, that obsessed with academics and grades, and that was too much of a commute. We wanted to continue our single car lifestyle. We seemed certain of what to say no to, but not what to say yes to. These choices drastically curtailed the list of private schools we could consider. Part of us felt that we had gone to fairly parochial, middling schools and we seemed to have turned out OK. So, we didn’t want to obsess over schools, but some nights we wondered if we were wrong ? Were we shortsighted or too radical to impose our ecological choices to Maya’s schooling ? Were we undervaluing academic achievement ?
And then one day, I had a conversation with a wise friend whose children are home schooled. He asked me to think about what I wanted Maya to get out of schools, what was the connection between learning and schooling. A host of quotes leapt to my mind, such as Mark Twain’s famous “Don’t let your schooling interfere with your education”, Churchill’s “My education was interrupted only by my schooling” and Einstein’s “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”. Upon a little more thinking, I was struck by the thoughts expressed at the beginning of this article.
My career is in software, a subject in which I took just a single unmemorable course in undergrad, “Programming in the Fortran language”. Everything else I learned in the backseat of classrooms as I programmed on a Casio PB-100 computer that my father bought for me. When he saw my burgeoning interest, he upgraded my computer to a ZX Spectrum, not a cheap venture in those days. It is from those roots that I’ve developed into what I consider a fairly successful place in the industry.
My most passionate side hobbies are running and writing. Both of these are self taught too. I never hired a coach or enrolled in a team to teach myself how to run a marathon and continue to improve my running skills without injuring myself. I spoke to a couple of wise, old runners and read a lot of books on running. I finished in the top 12% of all runners in the Big Sur Marathon, less than a year after I started training to run for a marathon.
On the other hand, my basics in science and math are abysmal, especially their application. Shanthala’s jaw frequently bruises her knee at my ignorance in basic concepts and their application in everyday life.
As I mulled about these thoughts, another friend pointed me to the videos of Sir Ken Robinson over at TED talks. The talks were riveting, entertaining and eye opening. They were a scathing indictment of schooling just about everywhere. I highly recommend you to take 20 minutes and watch this first video. You’ll also be well entertained.
Powered by ScribeFire.
