yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

Also up at the School Magazine.  During the last week I savoured William Dalrymple's ' The Golden Road '. It was after long that I read a book with 2 dictionaries and a thesaurus by my side. This book I was keen to read since a while, the dictionaries and the thesaurus however, I picked up on whim. The thesaurus was Collins ( ~ year 2006, pages 799 ), one of the dictionaries was The Pocket Oxford ( ~ year 1999, pages 1,089 ) and the other Oxford Advanced Learners ( ~ year 1989, pages 1,579 ).   Over the recent years I have gotten used to web-based dictionaries if a computer is handy. This is fine when I am working online but seldom the case when I am reading - especially given the locations I usually read at and the positions I am then in. So, more often than not, I plan to look up the words later and then conveniently end up forgetting them. People wiser have warned, later is a time that seldom arrives! On occasions I have also convinced myself that if I keep the book a...

Mirrored in words This piece finds place in Teacher Plus ’ July issue. Thanks are due to the team there. “ Why is the number of children in a school called strength ?” This question from the article, ‘ Of skills, learning, intelligences and … the marketplace ’ struck me. Why is it not the abilities of teachers or students, or values the school adhered to, or even the school’s infrastructure, I wondered, which are a school’s strength? The question also had me recall terms used in similar vein. Besides having me bemused, intrigued, and on occasions even uncomfortable, these terms have often left me with unanswered questions. Do these terms, their usage, mirror our changing worlds? During a recent conference, a speaker had mentioned how previously the ministry governing education in our country was referred to as ‘Education Ministry’. Today, schools and colleges come under the ambit of the ‘Ministry of Human Resource Development’. This change in title, he stressed, i...