Yeah E-Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y

I have been involved in working for a NGO called NIN Society. It was started by some of the youngsters of my age in the year 2009. I have already posted about our philosophy (http://freshlypenned.blogspot.in/2013/07/helping-being-contagious.html). I quite liked the idea with which they work. Make helping contagious. Making people realise that helping is their duty. It struck a chord with what I already had in mind. A sole reason for me to associate with their activities.

I have been involving myself in many of NIN Society's projects now and it has always been a fascinating experience altogether. I cherish the opportunity for sure. I have been able to know more about the attitude of people towards the society and the impact of their individualistic nature on the growth of the society. The magnitude of the task that we have in hand is humongous when we see it at a micro level. Make helping contagious. Given the status quo at one end, it is like taking the world towards the ideal end. From my experience, it is hard to crack the shell. Egos. Some people do not want to help others. It is like they do not have it in their genes. When they do not have enough time to think about their own life how is it virtually possible to think about others? Tough and good question. The hardest nut shell to crack. Some people in spite of their life commitments have the intention for sure but nothing would materialize into actual help. I appreciate the intention though. Some people help a little but not fully. I appreciate the little help but it would seem like they should have been quiet in the first place rather than take the decision of helping others. Only a few really want to make it big. They really influence the society. They make a huge difference in the community and take it to another level. When we are able to dissolve these differences in the helping nature of people and make people realize that helping is their duty, then even our profession becomes a help and thereby our duty. If this is the perspective with which a teacher and student operate then we will have every student successful with highest quality. Salary and money are then mere words.

I have been a part of a program that involves the uplifting of educational status of students of a village. The thought of helping those students came out when we identified that education can be the only tool to make the economic status and cultural status of the locality better. We are currently providing education for the students by using Skype sessions through a passionate teacher and also guiding them to get fluent with their English. Basically the interaction with them is almost every weekend. We help them with their English language. It is mutual learning. I learn a lot of Tamil words that I normally don't use when I speak to people by teaching them English through Tamil. 3 or 4 sessions have passed by and it is getting interesting. They have started asking doubts. They are involving themselves and showing the interest to learn. They come regularly to the classes. Given their conditions, I would have not studied till what I have studied for sure. You might ask me what difference we have made. The difference is not much. But for a 3-4 session period we have made them realize that language is around them like everything else. I consider it as a great achievement. They see language with a different sense now. Our success is making them ask questions to us and improving their inquisitiveness.

A few days back, a friend of mine called me. We had a chat after a very long time. He told me about how scary it is to see the generations after us. He told that it is very scary to see the smartness of 10th standard students and their exposure to technology. He added that we need to expose ourselves and update ourselves much more than what we are doing. In a sense, he is right. I was travelling in a bus the other day when I saw a final year student having a Samsung smart phone in his hand and interacting with his friend on the other side. After the interaction, he was typing in the small screen. It would have most probably been a WhatsApp or a Facebook. Thanks to Zucker.

I was actually travelling towards the village. It was the start of the English class for the students. We wanted to know where to start their English from. So to test their vocabulary we told them to write 10 words in English with their meaning in Tamil. We expected inhibitions but they in fact were ready to write more than 10. After making them write, we checked what they had written. It was scary. For many basic words like "She", they did not know the correct meaning. They are 11th standard students.
When compared to what my friend told the other day, what I was seeing was exactly another world. There was a world of difference between the smart kids of the city that my friend told and the ones that I was seeing. Why is there such a difference? After moving with the teachers in those schools and the students at village school, we clearly understood one gap. All that the students needed was someone to spend the time with them. They have the same capacity as that of the students of the city. They in fact have more interest in the subjects given their economic circumstances and family background.

The real scenario at schools in villages is that the desired quality that city students come out with is not to be seen in some students in the villages. On inquiry, one problem that we found out with the village school is that teachers come to the locality with the aim of having a work experience of 1 year. Because as per the government norms they are in need of the rural background experience of 1 year for getting transferred to the city and to have a good life for another 3 years, after which they get confirmed. They slog for 1 year in the locality tolerating the elephant-human conflicts that prevail and other transport problems and get transferred. They are able to follow their students for 1 year and then the new teacher comes in. He/She starts afresh. The attention on the students are very minimal in this case. Again the teachers cannot be blamed. They have their own lives to look at. Probably there should be a better system devised to handle the problem. Parents also play a very important role in the quality of the students. Parents should do their part of imparting the right atmosphere to the students as the time spent at home is more than at school.

When I came back down from the village on that day, I was thinking all along the way about why they need us. In fact the country should be able to work without the help of NGOs. Or in the other way, working of NGOs have to have a positive effect on the growth of the country. Tangibly or Intangibly. Have we got a measure of how much NGOs should contribute and how much the government and other agencies should contribute to the growth of such villages? We can't change the parents or teachers but maybe we can have a better system of handling the problem.Why can't every student at villages get the standard education that city students are able to get easily? In what way is there a difference in potential of the students? When you take ourselves as one entity, then we will have the differences made clear to everybody. There is difference in standards and it is hard and tough reality. As far as I have read about brain studies, skill development is common for all. If it is so, why is skill GIVING not made common for all? When a cricket match can be played with the same pitch conditions for both the teams, why can't education be the same for every village and city student? Aim should be to make the system like a parade wherein everybody moves to the same drum beat.

Yeah, we are talking about EQUALITY. Yeah E-Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y.

-SATZ

Order from Chaos

I recently read a book called "The Goal" by Eliyahu M Goldratt. A well known personality, he is known for his way of handling problems in industries, through what people call as the "common sense". He is a genius. From the book, I learnt one thing. That Goldratt can think easily. He is well known for his concept of "Theory of Constraints". He has built the concepts with pure common sense and with some down-to-earth thinking. Nevertheless, he has shown a lot of intuitiveness and dedicated thinking to arrive at the concepts. There was a small story in the book that got my attention very much and made me realize a greater picture. The experience might be the key for many problems.

Mendeleev was a chemist and a scientist. We all know him through the ever confusing "Periodic Table". I don't know how it is for others but for me Chemistry has always been a mystery. I have tried to study it in many different ways but I have not been able to drill any of those mind-boggling chemical equations into my head. I remember that I used to write every equation 15 -20 times especially those of Organic Chemistry. Bloody hell with it. It doesn't just get into the mind. Anyway, let me come to the real story.  Mendeleev did this astonishing work of finding the Periodic Table. So how did he really do it when others didn't? What really happened? Let us see.

Mendeleev wanted to arrange all chemical elements. Normally, when you have data, especially a large amount of data you will have the problem of finding an arrangement that would possibly be of any use to the world. It is difficult because there can be a lot of combinations and permutations possible and you don't know which would serve the best of your purpose. So why Mendeleev and his Periodic Table are popular?

When Mendeleev decided to arrange all elements, he did not know which arrangement to choose. He had a lot of parameters. Atomic weight, specific gravity, electrical conductivity, chemical behaviour etc. Now you can get an idea of the magnitude of the problem he faced. With a little patience, he decided to try out one by one. He chose to use a quantitative measurement that was known for each element and which did not change as a function of temperature or the state of the substance. He took atomic weight as a unique numerical identifier and he started arranging elements like the soldiers of an army in a line. So what is the big deal? All he found was this. Any little intelligent fellow would do this.

Mendeleev would have been ordinary if he had stopped there. But what he did was astonishing. He did not arrange the elements in one line. He identified that each seventh element represents basically the same chemical behaviour, though with increased intensity. For example, in the first column, Lithium which is the lightest of all metals and which when put into water becomes warm. Below it is Sodium, which when put into water, flames. The next one is Potassium which reacts even more violently with water. The last one is Cesium which flames even in regular air. He did not find all the elements. He had a lot of holes in the Periodic table. But this classification gave him the ability to predict the weight and other properties. 

After this was presented, Mendeleev became the laughing stock of the entire community of scientists. Now, the table was not arranged as I told you before. Hydrogen was floating above the table, not actually in any column, and some rows didn't have one element in their seventh column. Several elements were crowded in one spot. It looked a lot more messy that what we have now. This table that Mendeleev presented was the predictive model for the discovery of other elements. It worked with such surprising accuracy. It took some years, but while he was still alive all the elements that Mendeleev predicted were found. The last of the elements that he 'invented' was found sixteen years later. He predicted that it would be a dark gray metal. It was. He predicted its atomic weight would be about 72; in reality it was 72.32. Its specific gravity he thought would be about 5.5 and it was 5.47.

Ten years after the table was accepted, the noble gases were discovered. It so happened that the table had to have eight columns rather than seven. Mendeleev's table became an admiration.

Point here is that we are all trying to do this in our professions. It is not only for a chemist or a scientist. Even in our day to day life what we are trying to do is create order from chaos. All professions work towards the same goal. We try to find the intrinsic order. By intrinsic order, I mean we are trying to find the order that is already there, only seen in a chaotic manner. We just have to find it. What we need is a very simple tool to achieve this. Thinking processes. When you have a thinking process, you can create order from chaos, irrespective of your profession. Only thing is that you need to know how to apply. How to apply the thinking process to different professions? It stems from the fact of what you want to achieve. 

If Chemistry was taught like this I would have probably known all those chemical equations, without strain. Who really cares what you know nowadays? What speaks are the marks that you get? Students are made to cram and jam stuff into their heads, vomit in their exam paper, get marks, get a seat in college, cram and jam again and wonder what happened to the process. Here as well we are in need of a thinking process to help us find the order in what chaos we created. 

Find the Intrinsic order. Order from chaos will result from passion. A journey towards excellence is nothing but creating Order form Chaos. The journey involves thinking, a thinking deeply associated with the spirit of excellence. Let's find the order. In ourselves.

-SATZ