The Life of a Child

How to engage a guest at home - Tips from a three year old. Demonstrate your ability to recognize chess coins by their names and random alphabets in the newspaper. Serve imaginary coffee multiple times. Show where the juice is stored in the fridge. Suggest that the guest should drink water with a straw. Say bye when the guest gets up to leave and persevere until the guest disappears. 

Trends in Collaborative Education/Learning

Thanks to Ferina Santos - @ferinasantos - for sharing this excellent article on trends in Education. I think it is a wonderful overview of what the future of education is going to be like. No prizes for guessing that the emphasis is on collective and collaborative learning techniques and mechanisms! 

Read the full article here: The author is: Miriam Clifford - @miriamoclifford on Twitter

http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/features/facilitating-collaborative-learning-20-things-you-need-to-know-from-the-pros/ 

Here are some excerpts that appealed to my mind:

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Groups tend to learn through “discussion, clarification of ideas, and evaluation of other’s ideas”.  Perhaps information that is discussed is retained in long term memory.  Research by Webb suggests that students who worked collaboratively on math computational problems earned significantly higher scores than those who worked alone.  Plus, students who demonstrated lower levels of achievement improved when working in diverse groups. 

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Many studies such as those by Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins have considered how cooperative learning helps children develop social and interpersonal skills.  Experts have argued that the social and psychological effect on self-esteem and personal development are just as important as the learning itself. 

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The quality of discussions is a predictor of the achievement of the group.  Instructors should provide a model of how a successful group functions.  Shared leadership is best.  Students should work together on the task and maintenance functions of a group.  Roles are important in group development. Task functions include:

• Initiating Discussions
• Clarifying points
• Summarizing
• Challenging assumptions/devil’s advocate
• Providing or researching information
• Reaching a consensus.

Maintenance involves the harmony and emotional well-being of a group.  Maintenance includes roles such as:

• Sensing group feelings
• Harmonizing
• Compromising and encouraging
• Time-keeping
• Relieving tension
• Bringing people into discussion

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Focus on enhancing problem-solving and critical thinking skills.  Design assignments that allow room for varied interpretations.  Different types of problems might focus on categorizing, planning, taking multiple perspectives, or forming solutions

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The article winds up by reminding us about the criticisms of collaboration (it may not allow for individual thinking) and asks us to beware of group-think (groups may end up going by the views of a few confident and dominant people and may not really reach a consensus) 

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I am passionate about how we can reinvent education and learning methods so children are more engaged, excited and enthusiastic to be life-long learners. Of course, the other dimension is that they must be able to apply what they learn in their lives and, furthermore, use it to determine what their lives must be like (find their passion and gift and share it with the world.) I hope we are on the verge of a revolution! :-)

Tidbits

There is surely a STRONG link between childhood memories & happiness as an adult. Re-experiencing things that once gave you comfort perhaps reconnects the nodes in your brain to bring you deja vu Happiness.

(Think of that nice song you heard plenty of times as a kid. The walk you had with Grandma in your village. The movie you watched with cousins and laughed your head off. I am sure this is the case even with the not-so-nice memories. Childhood experiences are so so critical.)

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We must invent a body sensor+audio device that'll boom out a context-sensitive quote or two when one begins to get angry. :-)

Imagine: You are about to scream at someone because they are slow on the uptake and this device immediately says in a deep and strong voice "Be kind to everyone - Dalai Lama" or something to that effect.

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What fills the huge gap between education and attitude or behavior? The gap that we rarely fill......! Inspiration, introspection, insight AND extreme effort! Sigh. E.x.t.r.e.m.e E.f.f.o.r.t indeed.

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Life sometimes delivers gifts that seem wonderful until you spot the hidden price tag that it has forgotten to remove......and your attention shifts elsewhere. ;-) 

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Simplicity is not how easy it is for the TECHIES to IMPLEMENT the solution! It is how easy it is for the USER to understand and USE the solution! A TV may have a million circuits embedded inside it, but at the end of the day, the knobs outside must be just enough and easy to operate. 

Internet and a Child's Brain

Learning

Collective Learning

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to change the way children learn into a more collaborative experience. At the end of the decade, for them to grow up and be good members of the society and achieve something meaningful, they must learn to listen deeply, appreciate others' views and let each person express himself while still arriving at independent conclusions. Eventually, though, it is about posing the right questions as a collective, putting everything together and filtering the noise. 


Update: So, why do you think this is funny? :-P Because it sounds contradictory and paradoxical? However, I do think I have not articulated what's in my head well enough.... 

I am not saying we must not think independently. Just saying we must learn the art of arriving at independent conclusions and at the same time learn to appreciate that others may have different views due to their own perceptions, experiences and background. We need to be able to see why they think the way they think! 

If we can then put various ideas together and filter out what the collective thinks is noise, it may lead to a good decision in corporate environments. Lone artists or innovators can still go ahead and do their own thing without checking with anyone ;-)

Individual Destiny

The world is full of wonder. There are endless opportunities. There is a lot more we can do if only we don't focus so much on financial safety (or is it mostly greed?) all the time. Parents & teachers must try hard not to narrow their child's vision and lead him/her to where *they* think the treasure is. There's so much yet to be discovered. There's so much yet to be done. There are so many new and unexplored ideas and paths. 


Why create an unnecessarily competitive world that focuses on what everybody else wants to focus on, loses track of true humanity, chases something blindly and knows not what meaning there is to life? Why can't we each choose our own niche areas and complement and collaborate with each other to build a rich, meaningful, creative, cooperative, happy and sustainable world? 


Enough of the 'mass production' of individuals who think and work alike and chase the same things without believing in it. We need to preserve the uniqueness in each of us and celebrate that for life. We need to seek what fits us as individuals and learn to ignore many of the things that the world, for some strange reason, thinks is essential to lead a good life. 


Is the urban man who eats exotic and exquisite food once a week and commutes in an expensive car necessarily happier than the rural man who eats a simple meal of rice and vegetable all through the year and spends time relaxing in the natural breeze from the magnificent trees he has planted? Aren't they both happy as long as they leverage on their skills and ideas, identify and pursue a cause and vision that is important and meaningful to them and continuously expand their capacity to think, learn and act?

Happy-Busy-Ask

Courtesy: FB Share

Children can Fly

Excellent quotes on parenting:


Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. -Chinese Proverb


There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings - Goethe

Time to Change

I'd be lying if I said I was never ever addicted to TV. I recall being addicted to humorous serials, cartoons, adventure stories, and the weekly movie watch etc. Actually, I suspect I was more addicted to advertisements than the TV programs themselves, while I was in school. I have no reliable data on approximately how many hours of TV I got to watch every day but I think it was rationed and regulated to a large extent. Even otherwise, there weren't as many channels or even 24-hour channels, those days (Gasp! I must be older than I'd care to admit). 

Ask me what I think of TV now and my expression might be a honest and funny blend of disgust, irritation, sarcasm, exhaustion, anger and what not. I am truly the happiest when the TV is switched off (which normally means the house is silent and serene). I'd rather sit and read a nice book whilst eavesdropping on chirpy conversations between the neighborhood's birds or listening to the music of the breeze on the trees. I might watch an occasional cartoon or a nature/science program during the weekend, a nicely done low-drama musical contest or show and a rare good movie (if I happen to somehow know it is being aired or accidentally discover it). But my intention is to not watch more than a few hours of TV every week (let's say 7-8 hours a week). 


Intuitively, I am irrevocably convinced that watching a lot of TV is a miserable and dangerous habit for one's mental, spiritual and physical well-being. It distracts us from so many good and important things in life, reduces us to mute (or excited) spectators of many events, encourages us to be lazy, slows down our mental processes in many ways and fires our negative imagination more often than not (going by the types of serials and reality shows that are aired).  Even though the previous sentence may sound like I put the blame on TV and not ourselves, the undeniable truth is that it is up to us to not let TV dictate to our lives.


My biggest worry though is not so much the TV-watching habits of adults but the early onset of the habit in children. We're obviously robbing them of their wonderful lives by introducing them to the Idiot box and then "leading" by example. Think of families where there is minimum interaction between the adults and the children and all they do together is watch TV. Think of families which only have a debate or discussion when they need to decide which channel or program to watch. Think of families which know little about the real world around them but believe that the sensationalized and dramatically presented programs they watch on TV is what is real. Think of families that quite often collectively sacrifice silence, reading, music, playing a sport or game, pursuing an art, exercise and intimacy with nature and animals for their favorite TV programs. Think of what the children in such families are missing because of their biggest attraction and focus being TV. 


It's been discovered by many researchers that children who watch a lot of TV are more susceptible to attention deficit disorders. Children who lose their ability to concentrate and ability to think on their own because of being fed to the teeth with commercially motivated and deliberately packaged opinions in the form of advertisements and TV serials have obviously lost many things in their lives. Children who are unable to turn away from what is being fed to them and introspect in order to find their own version of truth and come to their own conclusions on how they want to lead their lives are, of course, not getting it right. If that's not a sad thing, I don't know a sad thing when I come across one. 

Source: Internet. (No copyrights were attached to the image)

This picture above winds (pun intended) it up for me quite well. It is time to change. It is time to stop watching so much TV. It is time to stop leading children into the mucky and deceptive whirlpool called TV. It is time to intelligently choose what to watch and not let our children's creative and energetic brains die a sad and early death. It is time to shape the future of our children, country and world by introducing them to different dimensions of the real world.


Note: This post has been written and submitted to the "Time to Change" contest on IndiBlogger - http://facebook.com/sftimetochange

Death of Deprivation

Deprivation of Love is death of the Soul

Deprivation of Knowledge is death of the Mind

Deprivation of Trust is death of the Heart

Deprivation of air, water and food is death of the Body

Deprivation of Freedom is death of Individuality 

Deprivation of Conversations is death of Relationships

Death of Deprivation is all we need.

Give your Children all you've got. Because you're all they've got. Happy Families are the foundation of a happy world. 


PS: Update: (Optional ;-))


Deprivation of Encouragement is death of Confidence
Deprivation of Travel is death of Wonder
Deprivation of Financial Assistance is death of Choice

Ken Robinson on Education & Creativity

Learning and The Dangers of Expertise

This talk provides good food for thought. Do watch it if you're interested in KM, Collaboration or Learning. The speaker warns us about the dangers of blindly believing so-called experts and not questioning them enough and about societies having to feel more comfortable about managing dissent. 


Someone from the audience asks a very valid question - About the impact that this might have on how we teach children. Here's what methinks:


Maybe this points to a clear need for collective learning amongst children? Rather than a teacher standing up in front of the class and preaching? And of course, the need for education to accommodate questions from students, Montessori style.


And, finally, consider this post in juxtaposition with the previous C&H strip. See the joke? :-)

One of the Best

Awesome strip this. The concept, the pictures, the expressions and all that sort of thing. What would we do without C&H to cheer us up when everything else in life seems a bit - temporarily, given that we are all optimists in the long run - dismal? Uh?

Source: gocomics.com

Individuality, Freedom, Human Potential

I am extremely passionate about the subject of parenting and believe it is a very critical thing to be understood and practiced if we are looking to ensure a wonderful future for our world. (Children, after all, are the future of this world). I also associate this topic with nurturing one's individuality, fulfilling one's mission and potential and, finally, leading a happy and peaceful life. Parents who do not understand any of this are hampering a growing human's individuality, freedom and potential. So, it is not surprising that I like this post from DailyOm, on parenting. 




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Living for Ourselves
Trying to Please Others

We don't need to live seeking approval from our parents or others; this can be overcome no matter what your age.

Most of us come to a point in our lives when we question why we are doing what we are doing, and many of us come to realize that we may be living our lives in an effort to make our parents happy. This realization can dawn when we are in our 20s, our 40s, or even later, depending upon how tight a hold our family of origin has on our psyche. We may feel shocked or depressed by this information, but we can trust that it is coming to us at this time because we are ready to find out what it would mean to live our lives for ourselves, following the call of our own soul, and refusing any longer to be beholden to someone else’s expectations. 

One of the most common reasons we are so tied into making our parents, or others, happy, is that we were not properly mirrored when we were children. We were not honored as individuals in our own right, with a will and purpose of our own, to be determined by our own unfolding. As a result, we learned to look outside of ourselves for approval, support, and direction rather than look within. The good news is that the part of us that was not adequately nurtured is still there, inside us, like a seed that has not yet received the sunlight and moisture it needs to open and to allow its inner contents to unfurl. It is never too late to provide ourselves with what we need to awaken this inner being. 


There are many ways to create a safe container for ourselves so that we can turn within and shine the light of awareness there. We may join a support group, go to therapy, or start a practice of journaling every day for half an hour. This experience of becoming is well worth the difficult work that may be required of us to get there. In whatever process we choose, we may feel worse before we feel better, but we will ultimately find out how to live our lives for ourselves and how to make ourselves happy.


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If you have any experiences to share, please do leave a comment. I'd be thrilled to share this post and the comments with people who need to understand this.

C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N

This post occurred to me out of the blue. Funnily enough, I am even unable to recall whether it came to me when I was about to drowse off yesterday night or this morning when I was trying to sit still for a while. Parenting is a topic that is very close to my heart and I believe if we focus on and know how to bring up children and (as a result) every family in the nation is a happy family, it might be the end of most problems our society faces today. 

Google Images

C - Coach the child (Being a coach is not the same thing as being a teacher)


H - Help when you're needed or Hold her hand as she walks her path


I - Inspire the child through your own actions and through other mediums like books, stories etc


L - Love the child irrespective of her flaws and faults. Laugh (share humorous moments) with the child as often as possible. 


D - Demonstrate things rather than just resorting to rhetoric (very stale piece of advice in parenting)

Google Images

R - Reward and Recognize the child appropriately (drawing a balance between over-rewarding and under-rewarding may be extremely difficult)


E - rElease the child from your grip and let her lead her own life except in situations that need you to be protective 


N - Nudge the child when nothing else works (Use tactics that are provoking but subtle. Note that Nudging is very different from Pushing or Forcing). But DO NOT Judge the child! As Mother Theresa said, where there is judgement, there can be no place for love (not reproduced verbatim)




I love acronyms or rather actual words that are given the form of an acronym. More often than not, I believe it is possible to creatively expand actual words into alphabetical pieces that make meaning independently and then as a whole. I have no idea what this technique is called (I'm sure someone must have coined a term for it) but I love it as it is one of the best ways to remember things.

Google Images

Parent - No Ideas for Rent

One of the most important things a parent can perhaps coach the child on is to not find comfort in someone else's agreement/approval but to go in search of her own mind.....in search of her own version of the truth and enjoy a 'personal' learning experience.

It's All in the Game

Google Images

Here's a sweet little anecdote worth sharing and all that. Last week, I was particularly bored and did not feel like doing anything much. So I decided to plop myself in front of my 5-month-old niece and discuss with her, among other things, the world and its apparent purpose. I started off by smiling and then laughing...in order to set the context, one might add. Obviously, as most small babies will, she smiled back at me and then laughed along with me. I lost track of what I set out to do and instead decided to respond to the situation and keep things going. What that means, by the way, is that I continued to laugh till I started to cough. She laughed along with me quite hysterically and then stopped laughing and gave me a puzzled look (when I coughed) as if accusing me of unfairly changing the rules of the game all of a sudden. Well, even small kids might misunderstand you, you know! ;-)

The Curse of the Idiot Box

This strip stabs me harder than you'd think. I seriously wish I could do something to rescue children who have been captured for what seems like forever in the sticky, useless and miserable web called Television. I know generalizations are not good for the world. TV does have its merits (Think Nat Geo, Animal Planet, Discovery, Music, Dance, Sports, Humor etc) but it, unarguably, has caused more harm than good. 

By Bill Watterson - Link

Consider this: Most channels, most of the time, air absolutely meaningless programs, serials, shows and movies. 9 out of 10 times, people watch a meaningless program rather than one that is 'nice', useful or thought-provoking. It distracts us - actually tears us away - from a lot of important and even essential chores. Parents neglect their responsibilities and children in their attempt to catch up with TV. Children neglect (and stay unaware of) the 'real' world, their studies, their friendships and what not because of their fascination for TV. Families fight over the remote constantly. House wives after being fed on a constant diet of horrible and infuriating characters through soaps and serials are subconsciously influenced to assume everyone around them are similar to these characters - or worse, they themselves begin to behave like that. Many research programs have proved beyond doubt that watching TV causes ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)....and God knows what else. Finally, I personally believe TV is one of the key reasons why most of us today are unable to enjoy 'silence' (apart from nature). An occasional humorous program for the family, a program that helps the children learn something new, a program that brings good music home etc are fine. It's up to us to draw a firm and thick line and keep ourselves from falling into this meaningless audio and video whirlpool.  

Thoughts to Remember

Steve's lovely post on 'The Child Within Us'


Extracts: (Thoughts to Remember)

Children are enthusiastic. They’ve not forgotten how to have fun. And they still feel awe and wonder and excitement.

“It’s a terrible thing when you lose that,” he said. I don’t think he meant that we are to be childish and immature - just childlike. There is a difference. 

To be childlike is to be fun-loving and ready to get lost in the present. To be childlike is to be more innocent and trusting. Quicker to embrace life and love. To be childlike is to not yet be jaded by the world or too cynical about people. Those who are childlike laugh easily and often. They know there is plenty about this universe they may not understand, and that is okay. In fact, mystery is good. It fills them with awe.