Category: Notes from a Teacher’s Diary

Rising from the abyss

Gita Nambiar
Board exams can be a stressful experience for students. Teachers need to be extra sensitive during this period and help students stay positive so that this threshold can be crossed with minimal tensions. Any kind of insensitive remarks can pull a child down or demotivate him/her. Instead, exerting the right amount of pressure, giving tips on time management, goal setting etc. will help the child to sail smoothly.

A potato problem from history

Lakshmi Mitter
Problem solving skills are very important in life today and a fun and interesting way to develop this skill is to examine and engage with problems in history. Here is how a bunch of modern day teenagers solved Prussian king, Fredrick the Great’s potato problem.

Learning with pleasure

Rajesh B Patil, Narendra D Deshmukh, Vinita Shrouty, and Nivedita Deshmukh
Hobbies are a good way to spend our spare time effectively. They give us pleasure and at the same time are educative.

Nurturing human values

N Sai Prashanti
Nurturing is a big part of school education now than ever before. Here are some ways in which human values can be inculcated in children.

Time to go back to the old teaching methods?

Latha Vydianathan
PBL, hands-on learning, experimental pedagogy are all very well, but have we done the right thing by ignoring learning by memory all together? Here is why sometimes memorization is also a good learning technique and why we must bring it back into our teaching methods.

The parent-teacher partnership

R Jeyatheerthan
Parents and teachers have to work together to turn our children into responsible, well-adjusted and balanced young adults. Let us come together for the sake of our children.

The delicate art of appreciation

Latha Vydianathan
Spoken language is a powerful medium and we must use it to benefit our students and encourage them. While we all praise our students’ efforts and are happy at their success, the words we choose to deliver that praise can significantly change the way our students react to what we are saying.

Play: outdoors vs. indoors

R Jeyatheerthan
Two years of COVID, two years of indoors, it is time to go into the outdoors now. With children addicted all the more to the indoors and staring at screens for long hours, we have to put the spring and jump back in their steps and lead them outside so that they are both physically and mentally fit.

Building context-sensitivity in questions

Vaidehi Sriram
In a pandemic – induced setting, teachers generally found it challenging to create authentic moments of conversation in the language classroom. The teacher needed to be acutely aware of the context while delivering a lesson. So, how can a teacher build context-sensitivity in the classroom? Here are a few strategies tried and tested which teachers can try out.