Writing Tamil. No, wait, Hindi really.

Now that we are in Tamil Nadu, I feel the need to learn to read/write Tamil. I talk about this to my kids as well -- I ask them if they want to learn to read Tamil too. Aparna shows no interest but Abhi says he wants to write Hindi. Okay. That doesn't quite follow from the earlier conversation but nature has no straight lines and I have learned to not be surprised with this child.
Abhi says, "First, teach me the Hindi alphabet."

I reply, "I don't know the full alphabet but I can show you how to write words."

Perhaps because the older brother is interested, Aparna is now interested as well.  So I sit down, flanked on either side by a kid, and start to write some words they know. Since both of them speak Hindi we are not attempting to read/write it while at the same time trying to learn the language, which is a different order of beast altogether.
I write, "आम" and "Aam", "अभिनव " and "Abhinav", "कुत्ता" and "kutta", "भूत" and "bhooth", and so on. Along the way we make frequent stops to talk about "matras" (diacritics) or the process of attaching vowels to the consonants. Soon we have a small collection of words, with a significant number of vowels, consonants and matras. We now begin to construct new words from old. Either one of them volunteers a word, or I suggest one to write. One of them suggests "shit", so we write "टट्टी" and "tatti", and as I sound it out they both laugh. No surprises there, scatological explorations are always funny. We continue like this for about forty minutes and then it is time for bed.

The next day Abhi wakes up with an idea. He has been working on a comic strip, and now he wants to write it in two languages. As he constructs the strip, his new idea is to leave all the speech bubbles blank. He wants to make a xerox copy of the strip and come back and fill in the speech bubbles, English in one copy and Hindi in the other. The copying will come later. For now he numbers the speech bubbles and on a separate piece of paper writes his dialog, first in English and then keeps coming to me for help with writing the Hindi version.
Some of the things he writes:
"Meanwhile..." and "इस बीच...",
"Ha! I am here." and "हा!, मैं आ गया ।",
and so on.

So now he has another reason to learn to write Hindi.


- Dev

After the bull was butchered

By August 2011, we had made up our minds to move back to India and live off the land. To get a first-hand experience of such a living, I started volunteering at a local organic farm in Cotati in Northern California. This farm had some vegetable beds, chickens, horses and pasture fed cows and bulls. I was working 5 hours every week, doing all kinds of odd jobs in the farm. Since my kids (8 and 5 years old then) were being homeschooled, this was a part of the learning experience. Their "learning" involved picking veggies when they were ready, eating tree-ripe fruit, enjoying time with the farm animals, collecting eggs from the chicken coop, relishing fresh butter and occasionally listening to parts of intense discussions about global economy, climate change, fossil fuel etc.

One day, the owner of the farm told us that he was expecting the local butcher. They had decided to get rid of the 2 year old bull that had contracted an infection. Being vegetarians, we dashed out as soon as we could. We got a glimpse of the big red truck that the butcher had come in. On the way back home, my kids and I discussed the options that the farm owner had, given the current scenario. It was interesting to observe the insights they had about this incident.

Two days later we returned to the farm. The bull was obviously gone and I was asked to clean the fenced open space (roughly 30' X 60') he had lived in. The ground there had caked cow dung. I was to scrape a few inches of the rich deposits and add it to the new compost pile. It took me two hours to finish the job. I had never done this kind of manual labor before. Something about this seemingly mundane job touched me deeply. 

I was thinking of this wonderful gift that the animal had left behind and how this gift will enrich the soil on the farm. Two years of life-span and no trace of waste that would pollute the place where the animal lived!! This seemed phenomenal to me. I began wondering about the amount of waste a human in its place would have generated. 

Thoughts and emotions were racing in my mind: "we, humans, are much smarter than this bull that had died
(at least we like to think so). But our intelligence seems to be detrimental to the state of the Planet. With all our intelligence, we have caused irreversible problems like global warming. Are we really smart? Or is the bull that died smarter than us?"

Interestingly, the farm owners started using the phrase "the bull in the deep freezer" when they had to refer to the bull that died. I was left wondering if this dead animal was now consuming more resources than it ever did when it was alive.

- Hema

Today's Schools, Deforestation and Global Warming

Deforestation and Global Warming are closely coupled and we all know that. But what about our schools of today? How do they relate to these?

Well, today's schools are quite resource-intensive. They are one of the biggest consumers of paper. I have observed pre-schools and alternative charter schools in America for a period of 9 collective years (I have two kids that went to pres-school and elementary school). Also, I know the state of affairs at schools in India. The picture is not much different.

Do you know how much paper was wasted over your child learning ABC's? And how much was wasted over 1,2,3's? I say "wasting" because, if the learning process is different the consumption and medium would be very different.

My grandmother in India remembers using sand as a medium to learn to write. Students were asked to use their index fingers to trace a letter or number on sand that was spread over the floor. This approach is used by some Montessori schools even now. The next generation (my parents, in 1950's) was introduced to slate and chalk. Paper made its way into kindergarten when I was in school in late 70's. Each generation has seen a overlap in the medium used -- as kids at school, my parents used both sand and slate; I have used both slate and paper.

The current generation primarily uses paper. The increasing workload at schools can only mean increasing demand for paper. Now add population growth to this picture and you can see why and how today's schools contribute toward deforestation and global warming.

Does the current generation of children know that they are using up their oxygen-giving, rain-giving trees? Do they know that the previous generation (i.e.we, their parents) is still busy deforesting and can never undo the damage done? How can we continue doing this injustice to our children? How can resources be exploited in the name of learning and education?

- Hema