| ஒத்திசைவு | प्रत्याह्वय | resonance |

This is a reflective piece written (some 5/6 years back or so, for me) on ‘doubt’ by my dear friend, a fine educational philosopher and Ms Guide – K. Rama – a respected colleague of mine and a fantastic Montessori teacher. Of course, this is not a hyperbole.

Let me say that, fantastic teachers are generally very hard to find and then – when you add the mighty  Montessori twist to it, oh well…

Elementary age children – really, really love her, for the magic that she manages to weave in the impressionable minds of the children – in the process, enthralling the gawking adults like yours truly too…Of course, my kids benefited immensely from all this magic.

I really miss her & the Montessori Magic these days. *sniff*

… I have been bloody lucky in many ways – and continue to be more lucky; how else can one justify my encounters with fantastic folks from all walks and sprints of life?

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

 Doubt

(Rama)

I had been meaning to write for a long time now.  When I did mention the idea of writing to some, they always said, “But where do you have the time!” and that’s just what I want to hear.  Anyways, here I go.  I plan to keep to it but let me see for how long.

Yesterday my sister and I watched the film ‘Doubt.’  As part of the post film discussions we realized that Doubt can be a powerful emotion.

Doubt is a good thing I’m sure because much enquiry comes from doubt.  Men (and women) have once upon a time sinfully doubted if the earth was the center of the Universe.

Only last week in class I gave a bunch of 9 and 10 year olds, the presentation of measuring the internal angles of triangles, quadrilaterals and polygons.  We measured the angles of an equilateral triangle and saw that they added up to 180 degrees.  Now, I was surely not going to give away the secret here but even if I did it would be completely “doubted”.  So the children saying, “I doubt if it would be so for an isosceles triangle or a scalene triangle!”, “what if the triangle had an obtuse angle?”, “what if it was a larger equilateral triangle?” set out to measure the angles of many, many triangles and other shapes as well.  The results are yet to be arrived at.

But I have many times in the past seen on their faces the joy of discovery, the joy of clearing a doubt.

The joy of seeing that the sum of internal angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees!  There are always a pi number of diameters in the circumference of a circle!  An inscribed square is always half a circumscribed square (I doubt if this works for all quadrilaterals, need to check out!)

In an elementary class the discoveries go on to – multiples of 9 always add up to 9, the square of a decanomial is the sum of its cubes, hot air always rises; light always travels in straight lines; words that end with ‘c’ and are occupations or hobbies are always end with the suffix –cian, monocotyledonous plants always have parallel veins and flower parts in threes and multiples of three… I could add one everyday!

The knowledge acquired is impressive but what matters to the child is the joy each of these discoveries gives him because he builds his very personality with these discoveries.  As Mario Montessori says, “When the elementary child is given a vision of the order of the universe he constructs the inner order of his personality through experiences in a structured world.  Inner order is necessary to be able to see meaning in one’s existence, to find one’s identity, to achieve independence, and to act in a meaningful way.”

Last Saturday I spent some blissful hours doing a few higher algebra activities with the cubing material.  I was doing (x + 2) (x + 1) and I did see in the book that it should result in x² + 3x + 2.  But I doubted it!  I did a good ten variations of x – 4, 7, 8… and saw that it worked always! Believe me it was most joyful!!!

Doubts and disbeliefs are plenty but predictions and certainties are way more!  What can be more joyful than ¼ always being 0.25! (But in one of the presentations a child did say, “I doubt if this would be so in base 6…)

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Rama also happens to be the grand duchess of the school that I had the good fortune of having been associated with, in case you have doubts.

Grand Dame Rama, regularly blogs these days at: Kissable Zebra Lips and Other Things

The WorldWeirdWeb has a whole lot of nonsense, but lots of gems too, if only one cares to look!

Come, rejoice with me – check out all her posts, one by one, savour them… Try Sleepless Science.  ..Prepared Environment  … …  We are Made of Stardust … …

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ps: sorry about the laboured pfun on some ‘old testament’ stuff – in the title of the post…