Have you heard the joke – my heart was a scalar, till it found you. Now it’s a vector. ‘Being in your element’ is like being a vector, an entity that has both speed and direction.Terence Tau is a vector. When he was two he watched Sesame Street, like many children do, but unlike most he used the television show to teach himself how to read! At age 3 he was solving equations, at age…

My son recently got a document from his school that lists the subjects he has to choose from for his GCSE exams. We were discussing his options and I asked him what are his parameters for choosing a subject? Right off the bat he said, “My interest in the subject and how good I am in it.”I agreed but suggested that he also consider a third parameter to guide his subject selection decision. This third…

“Who won World War II?  i. Goodies  ii. Baddies”  Taken from a cartoon, this line nicely sums up how multiple-choice questions in standardised examinations are dumbing down education. We have become besotted with how students perform in examinations. Such exam-centric education unduly emphasises learning the content of a discipline, usually by rote, and students often lack a deeper understanding of fundamental concepts or episteme of a discipline and the underlying thinking framework. In the 20th century stockpiling…

In Dec 2015 I was back again in the Himalayas to conduct Timeless Lifeskills workshops in small, rural schools. The theme of the workshops this visit was ‘Tinkering with Electronics & Circuits – Thinking Like a Scientist’.The underlying objective of the workshop was to make students aware of how experts in different disciplines think. In other words focus of the workshops was on 'Modes of Thinking'. Figuring out how a scientist thinks (observation > hypothesis > experiments >…

The brightly lit bulb in comics depicts a flash of insight, when something incomprehensible suddenly makes sense, the moment you go ‘A-ha, I got it!’ The mental exhilaration you get when you makea connection between something new and something you already know is called the a-ha moment.True comprehension is also what makes knowledge actionable.But why is it that your formal education journey doesn’t have too many of these a-ha moments? And what can you do…

As an independent educator, I often conduct workshops at schools and this gives me a chance to interact with teachers. Couple that with all the various parent-teacher meetings I have attended as a parent to a 14-year-old, and it means I have observations on the different kinds of teachers that people the education world. I find that they can broadly be classified into three types:Maximum Markus: Some who have a very narrow definition of schooling…

Long gone are the days when curiosity killed the cat. Meant for a time when asking questions – being curious – was considered undesirable, since you were only supposed to “receive” information being meted out to you in classrooms mostly, today it is curiosity that’ll take the learner a long way. We could revise that proverb to say well, ‘Be curious and you’ll be one cool cat!’If you think of a 21st century superhero –…

A common joke these days goes something like this –Child: “Dad, what is the meaning of the word omniverse?”Dad: “Umm, I don’t know."Child: “That’s ok. Can you ask Google?”We are living in an era that is often called the age of information explosion – which makes it impossible to know everything. But what does it mean, and what are its implications for the learners of today?When knowledge explodes, there is a big gap between ‘what…

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman narrates this story – when he was around 12 years old Feynman got a reputation for fixing radios. Once he was asked to fix a radio that made an ear piercing noise when it was switched on and it took a few minutes before the music started playing. The initial noise ruined the listening experience.Feynman thought for a while and figured…

We are discussing the history of education in the West. In Part-1, we looked at Greek and Roman education, influence of Christianity that led to the formation of Church schools, Monasteries, Grammar schools and later to formation of Universities. The 3Rs of education at this point were – Reading, ‘Riting and Religion. In Part-2, we looked at the influence of growing trade that gave impetus to Apprenticeship and also added the fourth R - ‘Rithmetic…

We are tracing the story of education in the West and in Part-1 we considered how the disciplinary Spartans, philosophical Athenians, pragmatic Romans and zealous Christians envisioned an educated person.The Christian Cathedral schools and Monastic schools grew in numbers and in importance. These schools were effectively run by one teacher, and as some teachers became famous, their fan following grew. As it happens when local television personalities become celebrities and move to Hollywood, rising tension…

The answer to the question “How ‘R’ you?” over the centuries has come to epitomise who is considered an educated person. ‘R’ is the defining letter when it comes to understanding the evolving story of western education. ‘R’ stands for Reading, of course, but the ‘R’ of ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic follow not too far behind. How they got added and how ‘R’ was redefined from Rhetoric to Religion to Reason, reveals the changing emphasis of education, which…

‘Humans Need Not Apply’ - a video that recently went viral describes the future of intelligent machines and how they will disrupt human employability. (https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU)Famous inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts that exponential increase in computing power will see artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing human intelligence in 2045. He describes this as the ‘Technological Singularity’, because by then, Kurzweil postulates, self-improving machines will think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans will not even comprehend…

Ecology is the study of interactions among organisms and their environment. Ideas too have their ecology.When the environment is VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, a lone genius is unlikely to find the most elegant solution to a complex problem. A network of curious people, with deep knowledge in different domains, has a higher probability of finding optimal solutions.Brian Eno calls such a network scenius – scenius is genius embedded not in the gene…

Learning is in our DNA. All creatures learn and adapt; it is at the very core of evolution. Psychologist James Baldwin suggested that an organism’s ability to learn new behaviours affects its reproductive success and therefore, over generations, through natural selection, becomes part of the genetic makeup of that organism. This is called the Baldwin Effect.The crows in Tokyo are a good example of this. They found an ingenious way to get themselves a meal…

Can the desire for social good go hand-in-hand with the thirst of ambition?It takes an Order of the British Empire to tell us how that is a rhetorical question.This week, in Cut to the Chase, we offer you thoughts and insights from Ramesh Vala OBE, on not just doing good, but doing it well. http://bit.ly/rameshvala

What's cooking in Cut to the Chase today?A gourmet chat with one of Delhi's most acclaimed chefs, the trend-setting, award-winning Sabyasachi Gorai, popularly known as Chef Saby. Read if you're considering a profession in the kitchen and see if you've got what it takes to brave the heat! http://bit.ly/chefsaby 

With 21+ years of experience in the corporate world including working at Unilever as Global Brand Director, Indranil Chakraborty decided to strike out on his own in 2013. He moved to Goa and founded StoryWorks, the first Indian company that focuses exclusively on business storytelling. In this conversation, among other things, he tells us that a big driver for entrepreneurs is not having a boss!http://bit.ly/indranil 

Super-cool, ultra-alt and ubër-indie music band Indian Ocean has always made songs in which a flute sounds as at-home as a fully amped electric guitar. They gave birth to an all-new sound that went onto create progenies for generations after. Advaita, most famously. You’ll find them at the helm of cutting-edge concepts often – both in the worlds of music and activism – and today, you’ll find them in their groove, on Cut to the…

This week in Cut to the Chase we chat with Ste Drayton, Chief Digital Officer at Watch Me Think, a UK-based start-up. Ste was earlier with WWF’s global HQ in Switzerland, where he worked for 14 years, leaving in 2011 when Head of Online.If you have aspirations of employment or entrepreneurship in the digital space, this interview is for you. http://bit.ly/stedrayton