Serendipity and Learning

Having learnt everything through English for most of my life - learning to read and write another language is proving to be an uphill task. Other conversational languages that I have learnt have been learnt via informal structures - so we learnt to speak these first before we learnt to write - so the learning process was different. But as I try to learn a new language (Sanskrit), English comes in the way. The grammar (or whatever little I know of it), the structure - all of it. This is perhaps true for anything else. If you have learnt something - unlearning that is an uphill task. Unlearning something and relearning something else (and these have to happen one after after the other) is a tough job. Whether it is a technique, whether it is instinct or whatever else... When we play a game for example, tackling every next level requires a bit of unlearning, followed by insight and then the solution! Unlearning is an important component of the learning process!

Most of the times when we learnt languages at school, there is hardly joy in the learning process. There are very few a-ha moments. For example, when we learnt English, we hardly learnt to appreciate the language. The appreciation happened much later via PG Wodehouse. (Our syllabus did have a PG lesson though - and a chapter out of the Little Prince and one from Sherlock Holmes  - so we had one good lesson a year). But the concept of reading a novel or a good story was not there. Some worthy had replaced it with a pathetic book on moral science or some such crap. Net result - zero appreciation. Take Hindi - again, there were snatches of some good poems and writings - but overall, Hindi was a dreary learning effort and I was thankful that I would never have to learn Hindi ever in my life. Marathi - similar lines - the selections was better than Hindi, but the overall effect of learning these languages did not leave us with any appreciation of the subject. The other language...

The vacations are coming to an end. The vacation for education is the human civilizational equivalent of disappearing cities. The books have all been covered with layers of mud, forests and infested with dangerous animals - mostly amnesia inducing. But the schools are about to reopen. And those ancient cities need to be discovered. Again. Now. The discovery is not easy though. The locals say that such cities never existed. The little ones deny that they were ever educated in the alphabet. In fact they are quite sure that certain alphabets do not exist in the Devanagari script. Satellite images clearly show the presence of lost cities under the earth, but the people around are not convinced. Old books have been produced, with their own writing to show that they were once educated in this language. However, a combination of amnesia and denial can do many things to civilization. And only the bravest of the brave archaeologists can delve deep into the mounds, brave the snakes and animal...

Solving a problem..Innovation...whatever you want to call it! A useful video to share...

It is one of those things that do not need explanation! Worth a watch this one...

Some years ago at a job interview a candidate told me, "I am looking for a challenge that is why I am looking for a new job" And I asked him,"Why is staying at your current job not challenging enough?" A few days ago, the little one was building yet another complex contraption with his building blocks and was stuck. He said, this is difficult. And off went the parental machine,"Well everything is difficult. Things take time and effort. And you know it. But ask yourself how come you do these challenges very well with patience, time and effort while other challenges like Hindi make you crib" "I don't like Hindi" Yes, in both cases, challenges are challenges only if the mind sees an element of positiveness in them.  If the learner does not accept your challenge as a challenge but as a drudgery then you have lost the battle. The 'why' has to be established in the learners mind - and then challenges become challenges worth tak...

Each time one downloads a new game app - the most likely reason is curiosity. Which is really, "Let me see what it is about." And in an area that we are interested in - that is the big pull. Do I care. If I do not, the existence of it is invisible. Once you download, what sustains the interest for that immediate trial is the novelty - because it is different - either the genre or the treatment or the format or something like that. The second is the challenge - how easy or difficult is it. And the trick is for it to be exactly in the middle  - not too easy not too difficult. And from then on, it is all about sustaining interest - are we progressing while maintaining the level of interest and challenge and that the parents do not see it as a waste of time and so on so forth. Until now, only two games have sustained our interest beyond 6 months. Take it Easy and Clash of Clans (now deleted because it was eating up too much time of parent and kid). Threes made it for a few w...