That's not fair.

'That's not fair', often I hear this from my students. I am sure this must sound familiar to parents. Children have a clear sense fairness these days. And they are very vocal about it when they find themselves at a disadvantage. If you are friendly with them then even across the age-difference they will make the claim to fairness. A generation back it wouldn't have occurred to us to apply same rules elders, but now they do.

Actually, I don't find much wrong about this sense of fairness. Grown-ups should set example by doing what they ask children to do - by-and-large. If we are to have a more egalitarian society tomorrow then we should encourage a clear sense of fairness and being vocal about it amongst the children.

I am however worried about the fact that children don't have as much sense of being unfair to others. I ask, 'Isn't it unfair to others if you talk while they are keeping quiet ?' and they don't get it. They don't see the urgency or symmetry in this logic. Compared to how passionate they are when they are treated unfairly, they are not troubled when their action is shown to be unfair to others. If you are dishonest then you are unfair to those around you who are honest. If you go out-of-turn then its unfair to those who are waiting for their turn.

We are some how teaching children when they are treated unfairly, but we largely ignore when their behaviour is unfair to others. Consequence of this, and the resulting crisis, can be seen daily in our life. People push each other to get into bus, they don't mind jumping red-signal. When we park we rarely think if our car would block someone else. When we honk it doesn't occur that we are encroaching on someones peace. We don't see it that way. We are becoming a society of 'don't care, won't care'.

If we fail to teach children the sense of being unfair to others, then that is the kind of society we will have tomorrow. I don't think there is enough debate, awareness and action happening about this either in schools or at home.

The Neuroscience Conference - Grade 5

I have stumbled upon one interesting way to teach lesson. Hold a conference on the subject, where children are the delegates. This is how it came about.

While teaching brain to Class 5, I went on to explain how scientists share their discoveries and research. I told them about conferences, how each person presents a talk, there are posters sessions, question-answers and discussion. There is Name-tag so you know who's who. Everyone listens to everyone. Kids said, they also want to have a conference of their own. So we announced a 'One Day Conference on Human Nervous System'. I assigned  somewhat challenging questions for each child to present. Here is the list of questions. Each question had some experiment or reading to be done.

Children made the posters and invitation cards for teachers. I made the badge for each child - that was my selling point. Finally, the day of the conference arrived. I had blocked four school periods for the conference. Each child had done some experiment and gathered some information. They explained their question, described their work and what they found. The audience was allowed to ask only two questions. There were many comments from others. Further discussion shifted to the lunch break. By evening, we wrapped the 'One Day Conference on Human Nervous System'.

Children naturally did everything that scientists do at a conference. They presented their work and exchanged ideas. Some questions remained unanswered. The event was such a success that we will be displaying their presentations on the board as a - poster session for parents.

This confirms my belief that children should be taught science, by teaching them how science actually works, rather than read about scientific work through books. This is one of the interesting ways in which a topic can be covered.

Self-organization and kids

It is known for a long time that when people self-organize to achieve something, the results are much better. Also they are more satisfied on their way to the goal. How far is this true for a group of children and should it be explored in schools ?

Recently I got opportunity to try the idea of Self-organization - the school concert. I decided to put-up a short song-dance for the annual concert. This is how it went. Thirty kids singed-up. I asked them to hear the song for a while and tell me who wants to be a singer, dancer or a musician. I gave three copies of the song to the three groups. Over the next one month - musicians adapted the the song, setting both the vocals and the instrumentals. Singers were the first to learn and sing in-tune. Dancers were lost for a while, till our dance-teacher showed a few steps to them, and they developed the moves. A week before the concert, I elected a child to be the conductor of the group. He was proud to hold the baton in his hand.

As we came together for the rehearsals, I could see how well they had adapted the song, dance and the music score. Effectively, children had learned to conduct themselves. The performance went-off well on the Concert day.

Now here is the thing. I had really not monitored what the kids were doing. They made copies of the song to give it to all. They decided who is good in what and selected their roles and instruments. They would gather for the rehearsal and plug-in their keyboards. I tried to provide them space for practice. They selected their costumes - as long as it was traditional. In the final performance, I was not even present anywhere near the hall. I got them dressed and sent-them off.

However there is one draw-back to such self-organized activities. It takes time. And time is one thing that schools don't have. You are asking for free time in which children can work-out their organization on-their-own ! I could  squirrel away small time for my class-kids in the name of concert practice. But this is near anathema to most schools.

This was a small experiment to see if self-organization would work with kids. If we can adopt such techniques we can achieve happy learning of higher quality.

Art of Negotiations II

Here is another example of how letting children negotiate is sometimes a wise decision. Occasionally boys get into bitter fighting. They are down to slapping and blows. Such fights are difficult to resolve as they have a long history,  you can never figure out who started it. So the next step is to call parents of both kids and talk to them about the incident. I call for diaries of both kids. This is something neither of the kids want. So I offer them a way out. They should step out-side the class for five minutes to discuss their fight and negotiate if possible. If they can't settle their differences then the note goes to their parents..

Five minutes later the boys knock on the door and stand in front of the class sheepishly. They have to explain to rest of the class their settlement. To my surprise, one of the boys has readily conceded his fault. The other boy graciously accepts it. We get on with the lesson.

When grown-ups resolve the issues, I have noticed, other children in the class often come back with their doubts about the incident for days. The issue seems to have not being quite settled. But when the two parties resolve the issue in front of the class, this has positive effect. All the class seems to be much more satisfied with the resolution. They get back to work with a clear closure.

We have had such five-minutes negotiations a handful of times so far and it's worked every time. The violence has gone down in last couple of months. It makes me believe that if children are gently guided into negotiations and are allowed to have space, they negotiate their differences much better than when adults try to bring order.

There are no bad kids

I have said this somewhere in the blog, but it won't hurt to make the point in bold. A teacher must verbally and explicitly explain the difference between being a "Bad boy or a girl" and "Bad behaviour". These two things mean very different things when seen from the point of view of a child.

 I have often seen teachers calling kids 'bad boy' or 'bad girl'. In most cases, what the teacher means, a common grown-up language, is that the behaviour of the kid is not acceptable. We all understand it, but do kids hear it that way ? Kid's language is not evolved enough to interpret it like adults do. They often fail to realize that "bad" refers to his/her behaviour and not to him/her. With repeated misfortune this could turn into "I am a bad girl or a boy".

When I want to severely scold someone, I explain that 'the behaviour is totally unacceptable'. Its the behaviour that I talk about and its the behaviour that I punish, never the boy or girl. Sporadically, I talk with kids about this difference . I say, while I won't distance them, neither will I tolerate their bad behaviour.

I think the cost of kids growing up with the "bad kid" label is too high. The solution is simple, start differentiating the two things. There are no bad kids, there is only bad behaviour.

A Window of opportunity...

I have noticed Grade 4-5 children some times ask profound questions. There is a narrow window of opportunity as children grow-up. It is between 9-11 years. This is the age where children are exposed to a lot of things in real world. They are old enough to understand the technical things around them. For example,  how elections and voting happens, what is open heart surgery, how does one get selected for national cricket team or which aircraft can go super-sonic etc.

They know these things but not necessarily do they understand them. In fact, at age 9-11 they are not old enough to understand how really complicated some of these things can get. They are blissfully unaware of the complexities of real world. It creates a sort of over-confidence in their mind that they know it and can tackle things.

This leads to a very fortunate situation - they are not afraid to raise some fundamental questions or take a shot at explanations or suggest outrageous ideas. One boy said, why can't we inject chlorophyll so that we can make our own food ? Other girl asked, why do we see the world up-right, if convex lens in our eye produces inverted image ? Another one asked about why there isn't a special symbol for units of area rather than, square meter ? What is zero divided by zero ? They couldn't believe that Euler proved its impossible to cross seven bridges of Konigsberg, they tried for many hours to solve it. They appreciate the beauty of Russell's paradox. There are more questions and suggestions in my class, I run out of time to complete my agenda.

What goes wrong then when they grow older ? Children tend to get a ready-made view of the complex world. The complexity of the reality sets-in. This directly diminishes their ability to ask un-adulterated questions and generate naive ideas. Sadly, the more learned you become, the less likely you are to take a fundamental approach.

I get some of the most profound ideas, most fundamental questions and most daring suggestions from the kids of age group 9-11 years. If excited properly and left loose to think freely, these kids often get to very core of the concepts and questions. May be we should hold back teaching them complex technical things for a while and let them be naive for a year or two more. Its a challenge to teach kids more yet keep them naive in spirit - so that they can keep thinking bold concepts and ask deeper questions.

How does science work ?

There is so much focus on teaching of science and maths in schools. The syllabus for Science is especially large as it has to cover the huge amount of knowledge we have gathered so far. The gap between the cutting-edge science and level at which kids start learning science is vast. Children have a long way to go.

To cover this divide, science is split into subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. Going even deeper into optics, mechanics, electricity etc. The focus in on the contents of science. Rarely do we teach children how science really works. The real initiation of children in science lies in teaching them the scientific process, not piles and piles of already derived science.

I had an unexpected opportunity to take this diversion in my class. One day I said that doing meditation every day should help in exam. Naturally children asked me, how do I know that ? I had to admit that I didn't really know if that was true. So we decided to find out. This is how science starts - almost always with a question - even a silly one. Would daily meditation improve exam performance ? that was the question.

The only way to find out was to do an experiment. What should we do to find out ? I asked children. Unbelievably I got some very good suggestions. Ideas that go to the very core of Science. One girl asked, how will we ever know if it worked unless we compared ? - that is what the controlled experiments are all about. A boy said that the two exams (with and without meditation) should be comparable. That's the idea of removing systematic errors. Another girl said, its easy to measure the exam performance, but how do we measure meditation ? That was profound. We needed a quantitative measure of meditation. We decided on a 5-point scale for mediation ( 1 is bad, 5 is excellent). A boy asked how many measurements should be done ? that leads to concept of independent measurements, variance and confidence in the data.

Every one agreed that we should measure mediation for next 20 days, at least twice a day. At the end of it there would be an exam. We will compare that performance to the one in the past. Frankly, this is a tougher experiment than normal science. Here, children have to be honestly rating their own meditation - objectively !

Its been four days now, my class is measuring their own meditation on the scale of 1-5. They are meticulously writing their observations in a table - with date and time. We will then roughly correlate these with their exam grades.

It may be that the results will show us nothing. And that is ok. There are three possible out-comes of any experiment, a Yes or a No or the results could be Inconclusive. In fact, rarely does a single experiment prove or disprove anything. Children will discuss what other parameters needed to be controlled.

We may not find link between meditation and performance with this experiment. But I hope children would learnt something about how science works,

1. Start with a question
2. Do a clean experiment
3. Prove, Disprove or declare to be Inconclusive.

PS: So here is the result. Of course, kids who did poor meditation did poorly in the exam. This however proves nothing. Just because two things get correlated doesn't mean there is a cause and effect between them. Both these behaviours could be resulting from a much deeper cause.

The Cutting Edge in Class

Talking about human nervous system in my science class and specifically about the brain, children are asking a lot of questions (age 10-11). Many of the questions I can't answer, I honestly told them. In fact, for many of their questions there are no answers as yet.

Then I came across this talk on What is creativity and can we study it. The talk is by a leading scientist on this open question. He does experiments using cutting edge technologies. But what struck me most was that some of the questions he asks are the very questions that my class was asking me. This was a fortunate situation. It gave me chance to show children that, when they grow-up, they have as much chance to take a shot at these mysteries as anyone else.

So I showed this video talk in my science class. I was bit apprehensive as parts of the talk are rather technical. But the experiment has Jazz musicians and Rap artists, whose brains were monitored. Children loved it and wanted to be played again. I realized that if you can show that their questions (i.e. children's questions) have relevance in the real world, children are very interested in learning and understanding. More so than in the past, children need to know that their thoughts mean something in real world - then they are willing to learn.

Art of negotiations...

During a recent outdoors camp two girls fought bitterly - hitting each other. One was considerably younger than other (8 yrs and 12 yrs). So to resolve the fight I separated them and tried to distract the younger one into some paper-folding activity. I made it clear that I want - no more discussion about the fight and get on with the camp activities.

After a while a couple of girls, who were not even involved with the tussle, came to me. They requested that I let the younger one go across and talk to elder one because - she is good at resolving the issues. They said that if its not sorted out then the fight will continue into the night so better to talk-it-over. Ok, I said, give it a try. And the two warring-factions did come to an understanding. I don't know what that was but they were back in the group.

This was something I had dreamed about and had faith in, but till now had not seen in action. I think, children are naturally good at negotiations. Left to themselves, they find a way to compromise which benefit everyone. As children grow old they loose this ability. It may be because their sense of self becomes stronger or peer pressure prohibits them from sitting down at the negotiating table with open mind or simply they form set opinions about others.

Whatever may be the reason, if younger children have this ability to negotiate then we can systemically cultivate it through deliberate exercises. When these children grow-up they would bring about consensus on apparently contentious issues.

We are seeing growing number of factions in every possible form - religious, socio-economic, regional, linguistics, political. Every one has strong views now a days. This is not a good sign. But there is a hope. If we can encourage children in the art of negotiations then we can reach that dream of global village.