NUTS & GUTS

Some parents say, from your roots don’t go astray

Education in the mother-tongue is the need of the day…

Other parents say, let our children have our way

Education in English will ensure an apt global pay…

But heed the children and what they have to say

Surely they would rather learn the fun way!

A real mess is served in the education tray…

where the nut gets screwed and the gut gives away!

The syllabus is a maze real knotty, and hey…

Queries are termed naughty in the class bay!

Self-esteem is eclipsed in the mind where it held sway…

As irrelevant leads to irreverence with every passing day!

What’s the point of learning Geography, if on eclipse day

… parent and teacher retire to the dark superstition bay?

What’s the point of testing data from the Science tray…

when the permission to experiment is stalled by a ‘nay’?

The wonderful world of mathematics goes regularly astray…

As the mechanical obscures the elementary, every single way!

As dates and details get hammered into a mind turning clay,

The History lessons defeat the message in the factual fray!

Not just black on white, prose or verse is really about grey

… unbridled is imagination, but education narrows the way!

Why the compulsion to learn by rote without going astray?

Theatre-fun would be better for the Bard to seize the day!

Learning is directly proportional to the fun, they say…

Yet book is thrust in the hand that must play with clay!

‘Leave the kids alone’ sang Pink Floyd on another day

Languages are the drapes for expression, just another way

Education is to empower the nut without the gut giving way!

Education needs to be better in the primary basic way…

- Pravin K. Sabnis

PERIGEE-SYZYGY

Perigee-syzygy is a term that observers of astronomy use when a full or new moon coincides with a close advance by the Moon towards the Earth. Perigee is the point at which the Moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth, and syzygy is a full or new moon. The phenomenon occurs often, and one such extreme position happened on 19 March 2011.

The media was full of doomsday predictions by the ‘supermoon’ – a term coined by an astrologer, Richard Nolle in 1979. However, the ‘Association of Friends of Astronomy’ (AFA) in Goa chose to use the occasion to educate the public through detailed information as well as actual viewing of the astronomical occurrence.

Satish, Raj and Rakesh of AFA led an interaction that demystified the fiction encircling the event. After all, there was no evidence that the episode would trigger predicted devastation by quakes and tsunami. They pointed out that reality of earlier ‘supermoons’ was distorted by doomsayers to buttress their business of fear. Inquisitive minds sought to know whatever possible impact due to perigee-syzygy.

Obviously, the biggest impact of the event was that people of all types had gathered with a choice to be better at analytical observation and critical thinking. The dynamic team of AFA had shared their knowledge as well as attitude and extended their circle of thinking individuals propelled by a thirst for facts and a fascination to unravel the unknown.

To BE BETTER at sifting fact from super-moon-fiction…

View perigee-syzygy as a time for rationale validation!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

Goa, India.

http://astrogoa.blogspot.com/2011/03/supermoon-demystified.html

SMS

Melville Bell had developed Visible Speech: a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. When the Bells moved to Boston in the 1870s, his son worked as a teacher at a School for the Deaf. At the age of 29 years, the son went on to be the first to receive a patent for his revolutionary invention – the telephone, on this very day in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell had successfully bettered the telegraph.

Over the years the telephone has evolved into becoming a very handy tool as well as an easily available and affordable appliance. However, it is also very true that communication via the phone is getting curt, mechanical and one-sided. The primary intent to help people communicate across a distance is being reduced a ‘telegraph’ way of communication, especially in the case of mobile phones through SMS – short message service.

There are so many of us who use the phone less to talk and use it more to send SMSs. Surely the original intention of Bell’s invention was to bridge the communication gap created by physical distance, but often we receive an SMS even from someone sitting next to us. It is not as if SMS is a bad thing, but it would be better to choose direct talk or a note or a face-to-face encounter as a better way of interpersonal communication. After all, it is said so well that the mechanical is death!

May we BE BETTER at personal connection…

Let SMS be a distant second to direct action!

- Pravin K. Sabnis