Pretty much every Nepali school textbook I have seen and read about, I have decided, actually hinders children's learning, forget promote -- and contribute to -- them! In this blog post, I show how a fifth grade textbook completely misses the mark.
The solution? Do away with the local and national level examinations in grades 8 and 10 and eliminate textbooks.
A glimpse into post-secondary school education in the country through a student's notebook and an examination paper. The two make very little sense. But that's post-secondary education in Nepal for you. No wonder we fail a vast majority of our students.
When a baby or toddler throws a temper tantrum, the easiest way to deal with it is to divert their attention to something else by talking to the child. It could be about something you see in the sky or nearby or it could be about the music you just started playing etc. The very very short attention span of such children means that they will readily and easily refocus their attention to a new stimulus from what they are fixated on when they are throwing the tantrum.
What and how you do things for and with toddlers matters hugely. The simply reason, of course, is that they pick up on a lot of that and essentially shapes them.
At a night club in Kathmandu, I recorded a video of a birthday celebration which included Roman candles on a cake, and aerosol sprays. It could have ended in disaster if not for the big space. I went and shared my concerns with the party-goers, which could have also ended in disaster...for me.
I have discovered that doing the right thing in Nepal could turn out to be the wrong thing to do because things might just not go the way you reasonably expect.
An educational exercise that explores how the realities of power, authority, and societal values influence our perceptions of the world. If you are an educator, you could easily do this with your students at school or college or university.
