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A naive endeavour to create a blog on science outreach activities with school kids, grad life, movies, books and pretty much everything that comes into mind while writing!

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Hillcrest Middle School...kids with special needs

"Education is the manifestation of perfection already in man" - this was said by one of the most notable Indian personality for centuries, Swami Vivekananda and I was told by my language teacher Kajolbabu, who had inspired me a lot to take my language studies seriously and to have a free independent mind....to let the education manifest....but at the same time this particular saying took a long time to manifest in my own mind, in other words I was puzzled by the very fact that if this is something already present in us why the manifestation differs so much and why it takes such a long time to realize the true nature of it....I guess this might bring us to the nature vs nurture concept, over stressing the importance of nurture and clearly showing us that the 'method' is the culprit.....


Interestingly, every child is very curious towards the nature surrounding them, they love to learn, to participate; but sadly enough during the growing up process, somewhere in the middle this whole enthusiasm evaporates and eventually what we end up doing is complaining about the system and how we hate that it is like this.....there are a very few good-fellas amongst us (rest of us are very very jealous of them, I know) who truly enjoys whatever they do , whatever they learn ....and the rest of us keep thinking about a change.....in profession.....in direction...... in fate...


Being grown up in a developing country and being part of a very very conventional education system, I was totally amazed to see other interesting modes of gathering and acquiring knowledge after leaving my country..I m not trying to say that only these unconventional casual methods are the best bet but something like education which is even more indispensable than we presume, should be fun to do and should start showing up its manifestation in a decent time course....luckily enough its true significance is being realized across the globe now and outreach activities are increasingly becoming popular among us...


Having said this much, I should now jump into our recent school visit for Science Outreach programme with standard 8 th  kids with special needs...and frankly it was much more fun than I had imagined it would be...the main aim of these science outreach programmes, run by graduate students, is to make science more interesting/popular among school kids and to give them a different perspective to think about science as a future career option..... obviously science is not the only coolest thing to do...but its just a different approach to show the fun part of doing science...


Being in a city where it rains 300 days a year, thankfully it was a beautiful sunny day....my outreach partner Teresa and me planned to start late in the morning after finishing some experiments, as we could manage to get a car from our department. To our surprise it was a much bigger car than we presumed and I have to admit that Teresa did a great job in driving it ....the only funny thing was that, the roof light refused to turn off even after our repeated trying of closing each doors including the rear one ! It was exact 15 minutes drive and we arrived to our destination which was a big one storied building....to our utter despair we again had to try closing off each doors and windows in order to turn off the roof light....but we were so excited about the event that we dint mind much...


At the reception the lady had no idea about this outreach event and requested us to wait in the lounge which was kind of fun as we managed to watch some parts of the Euro Cup match of Poland vs Czech Republic and a cute goal by Christiano Ronaldo....I dont follow soccer for a long time but it was fun to be a part of that excitement for a few minutes...eventually the helpful lady came back but she still had no clue which class room we were supposed to go...and thought of checking with the room bookings and while she was doing so over the telephone and a small gathering was forming in front of us with a questions in their curious faces which said "where do you guys want to go''....a teacher came and approached us with a smile and we were immediately assured that we came to the right place....thank goodness!


The classroom was big enough and there were total 39 students....to my surprise they were all busy chatting almost loudly with each other in the presence of their teachers....something which I will never imagine in a normal classroom period in India....we used to be scared of our teachers and they use to make sure we dont chit chat in front of them in a class......which is something I always hated....my mom used to get only one complaint during parent teacher meetings that your daughter is very chatty.....and she used to try and find so many lucrative trade off s with me in order to stop that...:)


After a quick introduction and greetings, we started giving a short presentation on the advantages of Fruit fly as a model for scientific research purpose and their life cycle.....and the kids seemed to be very attentive to that talk....I was actually surprised to find out their knowledge on genetics as a whole ...two students, a boy who almost looked like Harry Potter and a little girl, were even more curious than the rest and asked us questions such as how do you keep fruit flies in vials and how a mutation can be beneficial..something I could never even thought of at that age...they all seemed to quite enjoy our presentation....


We later continued the class by dividing them into groups of 5 and showing them some cool mutations and let them guess those and also name them...here where the fun began...most of the boys wanted to pair up with the  girls but none of the girls seemed interested enough....eventually the teachers kind of mixed them up proportionately....a group of five girls reminded me of my school days so much...they were kind of absent minded at the beginning and continuously kept discussing among themselves about something which apparently seemed something very serious....I remembered those days when everything seemed so very serious.... from a  pimple to a pizza topping everything we had to discuss in our group..


Eventually I got another shock of the day when pretty much every group started asking for a pen to write down the answers in their worksheets...apparently none of them in the class had a pen! and the teacher when asked for went down to bring some!! Long live i pad.....school days are changed man!...I remember bringing half a dozen pen, pencils etc and some cute pencil boxes too to school every day.....I think days are not far when our kids are going to ask us "did you use a pen and paper in your school...thats cool!"


The enthusiasm of the students amazed me .....every time when I am with them, I cant stop remembering how much fun it was being a school kid....Harry Potter, the very smart kid, as usual kind of knew most of the  answers and was quite obsessed with his magnifying glass.....we had to bring some more to neutralize the revolutionary atmosphere in his group....some of the answers they wrote were funny too....."Fruit Fly is a good model as its very difficult to have 20/30 brothers and sisters being humans and it takes long long time".....according to another student every mutation is caused by "excessive energy of those flies"....
I enjoyed this part the most....talking to them and finally after we discussed the answers with them, they wrote some 'thank you' cards for us....I remember one in particular in which a little girl wrote she wants to work with fruit flies when she grows up..I wish I would have brought that with me.....it was kind of inspiring!


As a hindsight, I feel we could have arranged some games and more visuals (videos) to bring them more into this  ..but there is always a next time.....definitely the happiest moment of the day were those question answer sessions and the thank you notes...and my little sad moment was, before leaving I wanted to gift a magnifying glass to Mr Potter....but he was waiting in a queue quite far away from us for his lunch to be served with the same eagerness .....I hope his enthusiasm and persistence prevails forever.....


Hopefully many more to come ....I will stop here with some of the images i took that day (obviously of that stupid car too)...not in the class as I dint want to make them feel different.....


let there be light .....always!!!







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