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An open letter to the principal of my college

I passed by the college from which I graduated today. I visited the area today and happened to be near my college, so thought of passing from in front of my college to refresh some of my memories. This is not to say I had any good memories. In fact I had only and only bad memories of the place, but I still wanted to visit the place because even though they were bad, they were mine. In spite of the fact that I still remember how horrific it felt to walk into an extremely smelly lab everyday, follow a set of procedures funnily called experiments, get my hands burnt with HNO3 and sometimes my bag too, or how hard it was to keep myself awake at 7:30 AM to listen to one of our professors talk discursively about some or the other law of physics or chemistry, it was a part of my life I felt strongly about and hence, they were memories I wanted to revisit.  Later when I came home I started speaking about the mindlessness of it all. How all of the students waking up at 7, mixing chemicals o...
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Some thoughts on language learning

My biggest concern when it comes to learning has been the learning of science, the philosophy which has completely transformed the course of humanity. I feel a lot needs to be done to reinvent how people learn science. Science is not only a body of knowledge but a way of thought. According to me it is not necessary to know of big concepts in science for everyone, instead what is more important is to understand and learn to practice the core ideas of science, which is composed to logic, experimentation and creative imagination. To develop a framework for the learning for science I will need to dive into the history of science, understand how the greeks maintained records of the skies, how the records were analysed, how primitive ideas in chemistry and biology were developed etc. This is a very onerous task and will take years for me to do if not decades.  However the learning of languages which many consider to be of deep value does not need such a deep study from me, for I believe ...
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Teaching is a misnomer

 Teaching: Half the world does it, the rest of the world is afflicted by it. It is a disease that afflicts everything from the lowest custodians of knowledge to the highest temples of learning. From the municipal school in interior India to the physics departments of Princeton and Stanford. Why do we teach ? So that the learner can learn. But can the learner be taught anything merely by bouncing sound waves on her eardrums, and showing her some associated visuals to form an image on her retina ? Obviously this is a gross exaggeration, what a teacher teaches cannot be termed as random sound waves and visuals. However if you think about it, this description is not too far off the mark. A human mind is very non linear, very random, very self motivated. How then can you tell this human mind to sit straight, at a fixed time and listen to what quadratic equations are, what is the atomic model or what is raoult's law ? If a human mind is not motivated or primed about something, anything r...
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The way ahead

 I have held the pain of learning by classical pedagogy as a splinter in my heart for more than 26 years now, that more than one fourth of the highest lifespan an average human being can be expected to live out. Although I have obsessed over the nature of learning, worked with NGOs in the field of education, worked with companies who claim to make educational games, spoken to intellectuals about my ideas of the central focus that history of science should receive in education, ran my 'edtech' startup, there is precious little that I have done to systematically chalk out my thoughts, in an elaborate expansive manner so that there can be a plan of action drawn from it. So the purpose of the blog is just that. To systematically put together my ideas on education so that they get consolidated and eventually I can draw a plan of action from them. So first things first, how did I start obsessing over the nature of education in the first place ? Simply put it was out of boredom and di...
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