square peg square hole

H“This is a very good report. But if you were in the seventh standard you would have got the highest and the topmost A star. But since you are in the fifth I am giving you only an A”
A couple of months ago Jasmine told me that there is a school project designed for me. It was on research and to get eth sphere of influence of the school on the students in class. Jispa had to take administer a survey on the students and present the findings. If anything I know research. So I sat with Jispa and figured a lot of things. I think I have blogged about this in the past.  So I sat with her and we listed down questions to which we could get answers that we could analyze. Post which we sat and made a tally sheet to collate the answers and then we made the graphs. We did graphs that made sense and we let Jispa make them. These were stacked bar graphs and other graphs. We did maps with circles of various radiuses. We let Jispa do a lot of the thinking with our help. Jispa understood a whole lot. The end result was a nice presentation with findings. I sat and beautified it with her. It was a complete team effort.
After all that, I saw the presentation returned yesterday with an ‘A’. Oh dam it. “This is a very good report. But if you were in the seventh standard you would have got the highest and the topmost ‘A’ star. But since you are in the fifth I am giving you only an A”. Now that’s not done. Sure parents helped a lot in making the presentation and report but please ask Jispa on her understanding of the report. You can’t just say – that’s too advanced. This is exactly the problem with the schooling today. You brow beat them into conformity to this extent. All outliers are just beaten out and you are rewarded for being the middle of the standard normal curve. I thought home work is meant to explore and understand with the help of parents. The question was – did Jispa understand what she did or did the parents do the project for her. We insisted that Jispa do a  majority of work. I took pains to let Jispa take the lead in designing questions. I taught her to think and dream of situations. To think through on the graphs while I suggested different graph styles. We did the graphs together by hand.
So no – the idea is simple. You have to have a standard assembly line for the workforce. People who get rewarded for being within the assembly set up. People who can see the square hole and mold themselves to it. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said ‘progress depends upon the unreasonable man’. It’s the same thing when Jispa comes home to complain “the teachers tell us at the start to ask questions and when we do during the year, they tell us to shut up”.
WE have too much rigidity and structure in the school. A syllabus to finish, an exam to administer and a result to declare. Who has the time and the inclination for outliers? The dam exam gives us enough stress and now if we push the boundaries of the project – that’s going to give us stress as well. Today morning I was taking up history for Jispa and I realized that she did not understand History the way it must be understood. Why was civil disobedience organized thus – why not any other way. How was the INC formed? The answers are all there in the text book but the connection and the logic between the turn of historical events is sadly missing from the pie.
Jasmine and I realize that now we have to be a greater part of Jispa’s education. From two aspects – one from a daily schedule perspective. Regular studies and taking up will ensure no last moment stress for her. That would a lot of work from my side as well. The second aspect – I will need to see the questions and answers and explain to her the answers so that she need not mug up but answer from a deeper understanding of the situation. That is pretty clear. Yesterday Jasmine and I were talking about this and we knew that our honey moon is over. The fun is over and the studies have started in earnest in school. Now it’s good bye to a lot of fun and games and a huge hello to focused studies. All this becomes critical if we have to maintain her swimming schedule and her studies. Both cannot suffer. They need to work regularly to coexist. Else one will cannibalize the other.
Dam it. Look at the unintended consequences of a simple membership that I convinced Jasmine to pick up. I also convinced Jasmine that we should put her in swimming so that she learns to swim. I have never imagined a competitive environment for her swimming. That was supposed to be a fun thing to do with dad on Sundays. Bah! The law of unintended consequences.

its a sexy job

Yesterday I was justifiably proud of myself. Yay yay. Jispa had to do a project in geography and it was about data and research. She and jasmine were like – this is right up Jasmine’s sleeve. Perfect. Well that put some extraordinary stress on me. I can do that in an instant. Jispa will have the best and sexiest project if I get involved but hell – that is not the job. I am not on trial here. Jispa is. She needs to learn and she needs to understand the magic of data and the bigger magic of showing the data in way that it tells stories.

Jispa had once told me that she doesn’t like me teaching because I can get very stressed out and upset when she doesn’t get the idea. She doesn’t like it. So I have been doing some deep amount of introspection. Why is that I am a great fun guy when I teach at the classrooms and such an ass for my daughter. I can have infinite patience with 60 kids but I lose it with one.  Shame on me. So I thought I probably need to change the setting. Can I use the whiteboard and teach like I teach in a classroom putting distance between the student and the teacher. Space in a classroom could be a liberating factor versus the direct and arm distance gaze (hence pressure) of a private tutor. Much like a book… what you need is also an ability to switch thoughts in the middle. Or like what Salman of the www.khanacademy.org founder says of why his youtube videos were such a hit with kids – the ability to pause and rewind.

Well I couldn’t pause and rewind or even give Jispa the button but I surely did put myself in a special mood before I started. I asked Jispa to sit on the table first and get her books and note book that has square checks on it. Then the BIG CHALLENGE. How do I explain to her without solving her problem? How do I assist her in thinking and put a basic process in place without giving out too much. Answer dena easy hai but to teach in a manner that she finds her own answers is extremely difficult. Admittedly this is the ultimate daddy teaching test. Because even in class in many ways I give a lot of answers, but homework help can never be giving answers. It has to be constructs as opposed to method. This time around it was even more difficult as the topic was not straight and especially since I have some strong and trained views on it. I pride myself in the firm for someone who not only understands data but I am especially good at structuring data so as to analyse it better. I have thought of terms and measured campaign along those lines. The very description of a term to be used helps in understanding the data in a way it makes sense. I am easily amongst the best in our office at this. My MIS over a period of time …. Ok ok… you get the point.

So how do I explain it to Jispa? So I was proud of the way I structured it for her. I sold her the magic of data. How data by itself means nothing. How more data would mean more of nothing? The context is a story. I taught her that data is nothing but a series of stories. These stories must be relevant, must have meaning must have context. Now in your project what stories do you want to tell and what is it that you must ask so that you know what to fill in the blanks. Then once a set of stories were told then the simple act of using existing data to tell more stories can be done – that ladies and gentleman is correlation without using the dirty.

I was so proud of myself. Now hopefully this weekend I will teach to draw up the loveliest questionnaire that is short but pertinent. And then after collection of data – the challenge will be to get her to be inspired to tell the best stories as possible. She shows a lot of promise and I am loving it. at the end of it I hope she not only loves the project but she loves doing a project with me.

There are two skills which will define the young individual of tomorrow – one is language. The ability to convince the other/ converse with another… the other is statistics. The world will belong to the statisticians. If you can’t read data you are dead. I am so happy with the chance to get her to love data that I am trying my best not to screw it up.

Here is Hal Varian on statistics and statistitians and how they are so sexy. Hal is the guy who worked with Google for their famous adwords bidding alogarithim. Basically – a very smart guy.

“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

You always have this problem of being surrounded by “yes men” and people who want to predigest everything for you. In the old organization, you had to have this whole army of people digesting information to be able to feed it to the decision maker at the top. But that’s not the way it works anymore: the information can be available across the ranks, to everyone in the organization. And what you need to ensure is that people have access to the data they need to make their day-to-day decisions. And this can be done much more easily than it could be done in the past. And it really empowers the knowledge workers to work more effectively.”