The Strangers

He was a patriot, he knew all the songs,
that were sung on Independence Day.
He stood up and saluted the flag,
when the anthem played.

He paid his taxes.
He cheered the team with the blue jerseys.
He raised his family with pride.
For he was an honorable man.

His neighbors were a bit odd.
They painted their house green.
They cooked and ate cows.
And did not salute the motherland.

They even burst firecrackers,
When the team in the green jerseys won.
Or it may have been Eid.
But who really knows anything about them.

He and his kin were the saviors of honor and tradition.
They, were leeches.
With such breakers of dharm,
how can the country progress?

Years passed, festivals were celebrated.
Every Diwali, homemade sweets were sent to the neighbors'.
For we were civilized. We were noble.

Their house seemed quiet today.
The goats and the chickens were all gone.
They were selling their property.
"Good riddance," said our educated son.

We went over, as kindly neighbors.
We muttered words of farewell, but we didn't inquire why.
They were moving, they said, back to where they came from.
Now, what was left for them here?

I felt they never belonged here, with us, anyway.
A hearse drove in just then, with a coffin draped in the Tricolour.
The neighbors were saluted by stiff soldiers, who had done this before.
And then they left, leaving the coffin behind.

The mother looked away. The father told us their son was killed in Kargil.
Oh, I said. For I, was an honorable man.

हिंदी को अधिक सरल बनाने का प्रयास

हाल ही में, मैं अपनी बेटी को हिंदी सिखाते वक्त मैंने देखा कि कुछ ची ज़ो को बदल दें तो हम हिंदी को और सरल बना सकतें हैं।

1. अ के आशोधनों को अन्य अक्षरों से अलग प्रकार से लिखा जाता है। इसको ऐसे बदलना चाहिये

इस बदलाव से अक्षर की लिखायी सुसंगत हो जायेगी और छात्रों को अतिरिक्त अक्षर सीखने नहीं पडेंगे।

2. तू, तुम और आप कि जगह, सब को "तुम" से ही बुलाना चाहीये। अंग्रेजी में सिर्फ "you" का शब्द इन तीन तूकार्राथी शब्दों के बदले में उपयोग किया जाता है। इससे वार्तालाप में समानता बढेगी।

More notes from an amateur Hindi teacher later,
Kuntal.

A machine learning approach to teaching math to an 8 year old

Over the weekend, I came across a bunch of "mathletes" question papers that my son had used over the years. He is now in high school. My daughter is in 2nd grade and I thought I'd pick age appropriate problems for her to think about. There were some concepts that she had not heard about so instead of teaching them the regular way, I thought I'd give her a few examples and see if she can learn the algorithm. She knows place values, addition, subtraction, multiplication and can do division graphically, by distributing the dividend sequentially into the divisor.

Average

I showed her the table below and asked her what "average" means:

Numbers	Average
3,5	4
4,4	4
6, 6, 6	6
4,6	5
3,4,5	4

She said the average was somewhere in the middle but couldn't come up with a formula to find it. I then asked her to add the numbers and see if the sum was related to the average. At that point, she figured out that the sum was double that of the average. For the rows with 3 numbers, I asked her to write the times table of the average and see if she could figure it out. At that point she lit up and said we need to count the numbers. After that, she put all the steps in words, very nicely.

Rounding

The question was "round 10424 to the nearest hundred," so I started with some examples.

Number	Round to 10
9	10
11	10
17	20
23	20
29	30

This was particularly pleasing, because she not only worked out the operation by herself, she also asked how would "5s" be handled. And I explained that all the mathematicians in the world had gathered together and shook each others' hands and agreed to always round it up.

I then gave her a few round up to 100 examples, which she understood quickly. Then she could answer the question correctly, after making one mistake in which she rounded up to 10.

Remainder

The question was, what is the remainder when dividing 124 by 8. The picture below shows the 3 columns that were initially given to her as examples - Dividend, Divisor, Remainder. All artwork is her own :).

This one, she hasn't completed yet. She got pretty close with the circled examples dividing 7 and 8 by 3, but hasn't formulated the algorithm just yet. Will update the blog once we do that.

Have a nice day  - and don't worry about #ftcqcom.
Kuntal.