Seeing More Great Teaching in Pune (Poona)

Crazy, physics, demo dude.

Wind chime of radio broadcasting.

When we left for the Institute of Astrophysics and Astronomy, I wasn’t expecting to meet India’s Mr. Wizard!  This guy was a crack up.   He speaks a mile a minute and is so enthusiastic about making physics demos and activities out of junk.  I was sitting in the front seat and got splashed by water and pieces of straw flung at me.  This guy was the most interactive presenter we’ve had.   The place he works for is awesome.  They’re a nonprofit that tries to make as many science experiments from materials easily found in villages and towns.  They’ve visited over 1000 different village schools and brought a ton of hands-on curriculum to them.  They’ve also done workshops for urban schools, but they say that very few teachers have time to implement these activities in their classes.  Their biggest cliental are villagers.  Go figure.  The villagers are probably going to make better innovative scientists than the elite urban kids.

We also visited another NGO that is trying to help village schools learn better spoken English.  Most of these schools teach in their mother tongues (in this case, Marathi) so very few of these students will ever go to higher education since all Indian universities are taught in English.  Also, any technical or professional job requires spoken English.  So this NGO is trying to help by broadcasting radio programs with 20 minute English lessons.  They’ve seen a vast improvement in confidence and accuracy with schools listening to these lessons.  This was another fascinating place!

Last, but not least, we visited another elite school for the gifted.  Really great place encouraging social development of students.  One unique requirement of each student is that they must spend 70 out of 310 days outside of the school, teaching village children, interning in industry, or volunteering at a place of their choice.  This is the first school we’ve seen make learning outside of the school mandatory.