By Subir Shukla Driving hard! too hard? If there is such a thing as a ‘slow’ learner, does it mean there are ‘slow’ teachers, ‘slow’ trainers, ‘slow’ HMs, ‘slow’ officials, ‘slow’ institutions, ‘slow’ systems? It’s amazing to see how many people use the term ‘slow’ learner without realizing how utterly WRONG it is. Firstly it’s labeling. Secondly, the norms themselves are not exactly precise – e.g. in exactly how many days or weeks, when taught in a specific manner, will a ‘normal’... 

How Do Teachers Change?   By Subir Shukla No one changes if there is no reason to change. So how can we create a reason for teachers to change? Simply telling teachers to change does not seem to work. We complain or we request them to change. During speeches, officers and leaders try to ‘inspire’ them to change. Yet… Why do you think this is so? What is the shortcoming in this approach? Sometimes teachers are threatened – they stand to lose their job or increment if they do not do certain things. Wherever this is done, the best result that it can achieve is to get teachers to... 

कैसे पढ़ायें अंग्रेजी? सुबीर शुक्ला   यह ज़रूरी नहीं कि जो अंग्रेजी बहुत अच्छे से जानता है वो ही उसे ठीक से पढ़ा सकता है. बच्चों को पढ़ाते हुए हम खुद भी तो उसे सीखते रह सकते हैं. देखिये कैसे. हमारी रोजमर्रा की भाषा में करीब २००० शब्द... 

Before teaching: let us answer the question – who Are Our Children? By Subir Shukla If you go to a tailor and ask for a shirt to be stitched, the first thing she will say is – for whom? And she’ll need to measure the person, or the shirt won’t fit. In fact, whether it’s a house being designed, an article being written, an object being created, we usually start with: ‘Who’s it for? What will they do with it? Under what conditions will it be used?’ The answers are usually not very general, since this doesn’t help make decisions. The more... 

Right to education [RTE] is a great idea but where are the teachers? New Delhi: once you note that the Right of all Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act requires a 30:1 teacher pupil ratio and lays down minimum qualifications for teachers, it becomes easy to see why state governments should be concerned with the issue of teacher training. Since only diploma-holders in elementary education are allowed to teach students from Class I to V, there is a frightening shortage of teachers in this category. According to the HRD Ministry, of the 13.3 lakh teachers to be recruited, Uttar Pradesh... 

Arindam Chaudhuri’s IIPM sues Caravan, Penguin and Google for defamation New Delhi: according to the latest reports, The Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) has filed a lawsuit against The Caravan magazine claiming damages of Rs 50 crore. The reason – Caravan’s cover story of February 2011 issue titled “Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations—and Insecurities—of India’s Middle Classes”. The article was written by Siddhartha Deb, a contributing editor at The Caravan. The interesting thing here is that the suit in question... 

Court stops FITJEE and Aakash from using photos of IIT-JEE and AIEEE topper in their ads: it’s high time! New Delhi: latest reports from Delhi mention that two leading coaching institutes have been restrained by the Delhi High Court from using the name, videos and photographs of Nitin Jain, the 2009 topper of IIT-JEE and AIEEE in promotional advertisements and publications. We are quite used to seeing full page and half-page ads in dailies studded with dozens of faces after the board and competitive exams. One would like to know what these faces say about the merits of joining a coaching... 

Two Types of Intervention in Education: Delivering vs Enabling With tens of large-scale educational programmes under implementation and hundreds of thousands of NGOs / Resource Persons / Consultants / Academics / Institutions all seeking to ‘intervene’ – what’s the best strategy to make a difference? With no numbers on hand, I can only guess – but it’s likely that over half of those seeking to ‘intervene’ are trying to run their own centres, own training programmes or running specific projects on behalf of the government. These are what I would call... 

The Hare, The Tortoise – and Superstition! by Subir Shukla As you know, there are many kinds of superstitions – some believe that if a cat crosses your path ‘something will happen’, others feel that a sneeze is a bad omen, and yet others believe that just because in an old story a tortoise won a race against a hare, it is the ‘slow and steady’ who will always win! Made you pause a little, didn’t it? And since you have paused, you may as well think a little. In the story, the slow and the steady won only when the one who could run fast went... 

The Tsunami We Don’t Always See By Subir Shukla Our hearts go out to the sufferings of people in Japan. The pictures of the tsunami rushing in and engulfing everything in sight, wreaking havoc – will stay with us. Our sympathies and support should – and will – be available to help our fellow human beings in whatever way we can. Our horror – and the desire to do something – would obviously be even more if we saw something similar happening all around us. And in a way something similar is happening all around us, only it is not as dramatic as a physical tsunami, making it a...