Guruprasad R. Athani
I decided to experiment with my breakfast today. Though my husband has always liked my Uppittu and Avalakki (poova), I am bored of them. I invented a new recipe today and named it ‘double decker tomato sandwich’. I made it with Chapatis. It looked yummy, but after eating it I realized that my experiment was a failure. Fortunately, I didn’t make my husband a guinea pig for my experiment.
My journey to our ‘school complex’ on my two-wheeler was without any incident. As soon as I entered the gate of the school complex, I saw two of my notorious (for their mischief) students waiting for me with excitement on their faces. One of them, Somu, handed over his phone to me and asked me to watch a video. I got a bit annoyed by this request and started walking towards the Prayer hall without looking at his video. He calmly walked behind me and said “You won’t believe what we did ma’am, our parachute worked!!” I stopped suddenly and looked at him with astonishment. The other boy, Kitti, now told me how they tried making a small parachute that we had discussed in class last week. Today, both of them apparently went to the terrace of the 4th floor of our school complex and dropped the parachute from there. When I was about to open my mouth in protest, Somu blurted out saying they took the help of our sports teacher to do this. Though, in our initial design, we wanted to tie a small teddy bear to the parachute, these two boys tied Kitti’s mobile phone to the parachute and dropped it from the terrace. Somu was actually trying to show me the video captured by the phone when the parachute was descending from the top of the building. By then, I also got excited and snatched the mobile phone from his hand and watched the video in awe. It was an aerial view of our school complex and looked really beautiful. I asked them to forward that video to me and promised them that I will upload the video onto our Innovative experiments section of the students’ portal. I was happy that we were going to reach our goal of 12 innovative science videos this year.

After the prayer, I realized I had half an hour of free time before my first planning period and walked towards our art and craft studio to meet our art teacher Shashi. I wanted his help in creating a model of a small space station to be showcased in the science exhibition scheduled next month. I passed by the side of a small pond where a bunch of students were observing something around the pond (perhaps they were studying pond ecosystems) and I almost crashed into Meena. She cautioned me to look where I walk and jokingly reminded me of the story of a blind scientist that she narrated last week in my class.
Meena is an excellent storyteller. I often take her help when I have to narrate stories of scientists to my students in class. I smiled at her and requested for another discovery story to be narrated in my chemistry class next week.
I met Shashi and explained to him the need of creating ‘microgravity’ drawings. He listened with great curiosity and assured that he would try painting such pictures.
‘Planning period’ was meant to create a plan for my teaching period scheduled the next day. I am supposed to watch a set of classroom teaching videos by experts and create my own plan for my class. Being a science teacher I am supposed to create opportunities for students to experience things before teaching
the related concepts. I entered the planning room and looked for an unoccupied computer. I pulled up a chair and sat on it and opened the lesson plan book. Logged in to the teachers portal and searched for chapter 4 that I was planning to start from the next day. Several videos showed up on screen and I looked for the one by my favorite ‘expert teacher’, Jagadish. I always watch his videos when preparing for Physics class. I wanted to watch how he was going to discuss the concepts related to energy. He effortlessly demonstrated that the term – energy, that we use in physics, chemistry and biology are all the same. I had not realized that the chemical bonding between the atoms of the molecules is simply due to the electrostatic potential energy and that plants use sunlight to generate potential energy by building big molecules from small molecules. He showed how to build demo-molecules using springs and magnets. I got really excited by thinking about how my students would react when I demonstrate the same in the classroom the next day. I noted down the materials needed in my notebook and also wrote down the details of my plan to introduce the concept of ‘energy’ to my students.

My next stop was the lab. I had to try a couple of experiments before I asked children to carry out those experiments in the classroom. First, I tried out the measurement of the density of a stone using Archimedes principle. This was needed for the class I was to take in the afternoon. This experiment was easy for me because I had made many students conduct this experiment in the class before. I needed to try a magnet and spring experiment which was very new for me. I found that our lab didn’t have the kind of magnets that Jagadish used in his video. I went to the ‘lab stores’ and asked them whether they had gotten any delivery from the recent visit of mobile labs last Friday. Every Friday afternoon a van-based ‘mobile lab’ visits us from the District Science Centre. They carry material for the experiments that we need to conduct in that month. They also have a mini-lab inside the van and teachers can conduct some experiments using the equipment there. Many smaller schools (which are not part of the school complex yet) can utilize these labs to conduct interesting experiments. I was happy to find a set of suitable magnets delivered last Friday. I signed the release document and carried them to the lab. Next half an hour I was fully involved in creating molecules using magnets and springs. I tried a couple of methods to demonstrate the breaking of bonds to release energy. Imagining that these kinds of things happen in our muscles to release energy was very intriguing.
As per my timetable I had two teaching periods scheduled. The one before lunch was a class about the solar system, specifically – the moon’s movement around Earth. After lunch I was to take a class about Archimedes’ principle. I collected the materials needed to demonstrate Moon’s movement and walked towards the classroom.
I had given a home-work to students a month back. They were supposed to watch the moon every night and draw a picture of it on a graph sheet. I had also specified the diameter of the circle they must use for drawing the full moon. They were supposed to submit their assignment and we had to develop some theories based on those pictures during the class. As I entered the classroom, students greeted me cheerfully and were waving their graph sheets indicating that they had finished their assignment.
I asked the students to sit down and recollect their month-long experience of observing the moon during night and drawing the pictures. Did they enjoy the process? Did they find it hard to do? Did they learn anything other than the moon during the observations? I asked children to think about these questions.
I asked 4 children to explain their experiences. Suma talked about her experience and she said she now enjoys going on the terrace after dinner and watching the moon and stars. She also came to know the names of many stars in the sky. She has taken up a task of searching for all the 12 zodiac signs in the sky. Madhu and D’souza spoke about the difficulties they faced due to cloud coverage during some nights.
They had to wait for an hour before being able to see the moon and draw the picture. Reshma said she made another observation. Every night she used to watch the sky at about 9 pm but she found the moon to be at a different place in the sky. She said if she sees the moon today, she can now predict where the moon would be in 10 days!
This was much more than what I expected from experiential learning techniques that we started using from last year. I started smiling thinking about how we used to teach about the moon before NEP. We used to be happy if children practiced the answers and reproduced them in the exam word by word. Now it all looked so mundane.
Then I extracted several items from my ‘experiment material box’ and lined them on my table. There were some torches and various sized plastic balls. I made groups of 5 children and gave them the task of recreating the moon’s shape in the classroom. I chose one graph sheet from the group of sheets they drew for each group and asked them to create exactly the same scenario in the classroom using a torch (as sun) and plastic balls as moon and earth. This was almost a party time for children. They thoroughly enjoyed the experience and I am sure the learning they got out of this stays with them.
I take pride in conducting this activity with children because I designed these experiments. I had uploaded the details and video of this activity in teachers’ portal and I have been receiving a lot of views and admiration from other students and teachers. I hope the district expert teacher’s committee will consider this for evaluating my performance this year.
During lunch, our math teacher Ganesh was having some interesting arguments with our geography teacher Srilatha. They had some disagreement regarding the calculation of latitudes’ and longitudes. I couldn’t give full attention to their discussion though it was an interesting topic for me. My mind was occupied with the Archimedes principle. Previous week, I had shown a small documentary about Archimedes. I downloaded this video from the teachers’ portal and used our ‘projection room’ to show the video to children. I was hoping children will recollect the golden crown story.
I collected some beakers, measuring cups, a balance and some threads from the lab and went to the classroom. When I entered the classroom, I saw several students holding stones in their hands. I had told them to bring one stone each without telling them why that was needed. They were very curious to know what they were supposed to do with those stones.
I explained the task to them. Calculate the density of the stone that they brought using Archimedes principle. I gave some basic ideas and asked them to build on those ideas and work in groups. When I started distributing the beakers to each group, Somu said it might not be possible for him to do the experiment. I asked him the reason. He bent towards the side of his desk and slowly lifted his stone. It was not a stone, it was a rock. It was so big and heavy that he was finding it hard to hold it in his hand. He had decided to bring the biggest stone to the classroom!. Everyone started laughing. I asked Somu to go out and bring a smaller stone to conduct this experiment. I told him to use his rock to sit on while doing the experiment. He was happy.

I had planned this period to extend beyond the stipulated 45 minutes by making adjustments with the math teacher Ganesh who would be handling the next period. I had promised him that I would teach the concept of volume which was part of the math syllabus, so he accommodated my request. The class went on for more than an hour and no one noticed the passage of time.
The day was highly satisfying. I didn’t want to remember the days when we spent most of the day doing some administrative work or census related work etc. NEP came as a big relief to all the teachers who are interested in imparting real learning to students.
I came home tired but happy. After resting for a while, I spent some time reading poems from DVG’s book MankuThimmana Kagga. These poems give me a lot of energy. (Is this energy the same as the energy I studied in science? I decided to explore later).
During dinner my husband looked at me and said “you failed again in your cooking experiment, right?” I realized that somehow he had come to know about the morning breakfast experiment. I smiled at him and said “I didn’t fail. The experiment failed but I succeeded in learning” and I added “I learnt the process of science!” He changed the subject quickly.