Exploring to Learn

Time has whooshed past like a giant whirlwind taking me with it on a roller-coaster ride, experiences of myriad colours, emotions, sizes swallowed up my little world, leaving me a tad dazed. Now months later I've somehow found a foothold for some moments,or so it seems, and I make a dash for the keyboard, the pen's rich cousin. During the time of my last post I was teaching little ones...this year I'm back to teaching young adolescents, Middle School. The morning rush remains the same. The only change being that the little kid at home now gets tagged along with me to my school. The school bus is larger, the attendance list longer, and as you would expect,the minutes spent on admonishing and monitoring have increased. The classroom dynamics have changed. Instead of the unself-conscious hugs and "Good Morning Ma'am' tugs at the dupatta,the morning greetings are now more like a friendly exchange of news and information to begin the day. These pre-teens love ev...

Finally the day ear-marked for fathers all over the world, is over. The excitement so visible from weeks ago, screaming out from banners outside greeting card shops, billboards, hoardings at strategic locations, advertisements on television, FM channels, newspapers, magazines................daring you to miss it, has died down. I wondered what my father's reaction would be, had he been alive today, and I'd wished him Happy Father's Day with all the outpourings of a daughter's heart in a delicately designed greetings card and a box of his favourite assorted biscuits. His typical reaction would have been, "Father's Day?Eshob abar ki biliti dhong?Kintu biscuit gulo ene khoob bhalo korechish, Ma." To my Baba(that's what I'd call him), celebration of such days were no more than a westernized fad.The biscuits, rather than the occasion they were meant for, would make him glad. To me, every day I thank my dad for what he has been to me, is Father's D...