Experiments - a chapter from 'To, The Principal...yours sincerely'

Dear Principal,

I still remember the day I graduated to grade 5…one of the changes I was excited about was the move from pencils to pens. I had grown up and could now write with a pen. Another thing which came in with it was a practical copy and a new entry into the time-table …‘Practicals’… yes... now I could do ‘practicals’… I could do experiments.
But I guess it was a little too late. All these years until I reached grade 5, I always wanted to experiment…wanted to see what would happen if I mixed blue into silver and many other weird experiments, which were never permitted. And now suddenly the school said ‘you will do experiments’. But only those experiments, which are given in the book. Experiments, for which the outcomes were already known. Wonder then…why did we do them?
The word ‘experiment’ for a child smells of adventure. Of thrill! Let’s see what happens if…? Is it possible to…? But unfortunately the moment a kid is introduced to practicals…experiments…and laboratory…the first instruction s/he is given is not to experiment. Don’t touch this! Don’t touch that! Do just whatever you are told to do! While I do understand that kids may get into difficult situations in laboratories but nevertheless there are better ways of introducing labs to kids.
There are so many inhibitions in engaging with the laboratory that the thrill to engage in an experiment goes away. The kid is not permitted any free time to experiment on his/her own…to let that seed of experimentation grow.
Moreover, the laboratories are supposed to be clean…completely clean. I wish I could arrange a tour to the actual laboratories of Edison or Newton and other scientists. I am sure they were anything but clean. And this obsession with cleanliness goes on.
A practical ‘copy’ (read notebook) is an investment. A ‘copy’ bigger than the other ‘copies’ and at a bigger price too. It’s a ‘copy’ of a kind, as one side is blank while the other is with lines. All you have to do in the practical copy is to copy the steps of an experiment on the right hand side (with lines) and make a ‘neat and clean’ diagram of the experiment on the other side. There should be no cuttings…it has to be neat and clean.
It’s not difficult to imagine the practical ‘copies’ of Newton and Edison.
I know there are some CBSE guidelines that need to be followed. But don’t you think we have extrapolated the logic to the hilt?
My Physics teacher at a school in Bangalore, Ms Usha, was perhaps the best teacher I have ever seen to make ‘practicals’ – practical for me and for most of my class.
She was smart and thus made us do the right thing without violating the existing system of maintaining neat and clean practical copies. She advised us to keep a rough copy along with the practical copy. And she declared, “I will only check the rough copies.”
We thought it was a joke but she did it. She never ever saw our neat and clean practical copies…she always checked our rough practical copies. She also used to say, “The dirtiest copy is the best…you have to work hard to get a dirty lab copy. The person must have done a real experiment to have done so many calculations.”
I still remember one of the first experiments she gave us. We were in Class XI at that time and all set to do experiments on resistors in ‘series’ or in ‘parallel’. But I guess she knew where we came from. She gave us scales and asked us to measure the tables and chairs in the lab and take measurements of laboratory tables at least thrice and note down the measurements.
We were getting different measurements every time. She asked us to take an average and thus taught us about errors in measurement…a learning we used in doing other experiments in the course. Great teacher she was.
I don’t know where she is now and whether she got the President’s Award or not.
But Usha Ma’m, you have got this student’s award for the best teacher. And I wish that every school in India has a teacher like you.
And you don’t have to guess that our favourite hangout in the school was the Physics laboratory because we actually got to do experiments there. Usha Ma’m had given clear instructions to the lab-in-charge to let us take out any apparatus in the lab and let us do anything we want to do with it. We loved it and must have done hundreds of experiments, which were not there in the book.

I dream of a chemistry teacher, who lets the kids do harmless experiments before she starts teaching how to verify the cat ions and anions. I dream of a lab where students are let free to experiment.
How I wish students would get excited about going to the lab to be ‘scientists’. Laboratory – a place of freedom.
Our obsession with labs to be ‘sacred places’ with innumerable rituals creates dumb kids, who keep on doing experiments, the results of which are known to the entire world and are in fact published. We kill the scientist in our kids there and then.
Another thing which I had been itching to write about can also be mentioned here. Science laboratories as I conceive should be interesting places but I see no logic in them being exhibition areas.
There is perhaps no science laboratory worth its salt in this country which does not have a human skeleton on display - some in boxes, lined with glass and some not (full of dust). School budgets have spent considerable amounts to get that skeleton.
But let me tell you a very simple truth…most of the school teachers have never used it as an aid for an experiment…because it’s not required. Also - if I may not exaggerate - no teacher would have ever spent even 5 minutes in front of the skeleton. Interestingly none of the practical books starting from class 5 onwards mention the need to have a skeleton present for experimenting…yet it’s there in almost every science lab in our country…wonder why?
The only sound reason somebody gave me was that it’s used to teach that the human body has 206 bones and the longest is the lemur or something. So much of investment to give that little piece of information…and where’s the experiment? Laboratories, I am sure are much more than exhibits.
Talking about exhibits, a lot of the labs in this country have exhibits of star fish, some snakes and what not…which have no relation to the curriculum but are still there for two reasons:
What’s a lab which doesn’t look like one? – a museum with exhibits, which looks scientific.
After all where else does the school spend its money given to set up a lab? How many beakers, jars and test tubes can you buy? Needless to say that there is no laboratory in this country, where students haven’t fought with the lab attendant to get extra test tubes. Test tubes are always in scarcity…perhaps to fund the star fishes.

I also want to meet the pedagogue, who first said that ‘practicals’ and experiments should be introduced at Grade 5. Experiments have to be introduced at pre-school. And I am sure Maria Montessori would have agreed with me that the time when a child most wants to do experiments is in pre-school.
If one thinks of it, there are so many experiments young kids of Grade 1 to 5 would want to do, which will make education meaningful for them. Imagine a child who has been doing experiments since early childhood getting into a full fledged laboratory in college. S/he will set the IIT/AIIMS laboratories on ‘fire’ for sure.
The flow of thoughts on the issue led me to another interesting ‘discovery’ – there is no space in our curriculum for experiments in social sciences. While sciences have been given their share of ‘practicals’ and now even Mathematics…social sciences haven’t been found worth it to have a lab.
Some pedagogues may question my intentions on experimenting in social sciences, but it just requires a creative mind to do experiments in social sciences without compromising human dignity.
At the moment it is a challenge for any person to conceive of a Social Science Lab but believe me, it will be much more than a globe. For innumerable years, kids have wondered how glacial moraines, ox-bow lakes and even for that matter V- shaped valleys look like. But apart from some good books on geography by expensive publishers, people have no clue how these things look. Models on innumerable geographic features like fjords, canyons, U shaped valleys could send the kid into an altogether different world.
I remember going to my grandparents’ house for my summer holidays, and we had a pipe leaking somewhere near the garden. My brother and I actually channelized that water into some flower beds down the hill. We even dammed the water at points and then let it flood. But it was interesting to see how after some flow of water, sand started collecting at places. The entire riverine dynamics of water was there in front of us. That was my geography lab as my school didn’t have one.
And why Geography…how about ‘civics’ (I am glad somebody changed the name from civics to ‘socio-political life’ instead). Every ‘civics’ book talks about the constitution but a kid would have to go to the library to find a copy. How about having some posters of political parties, an Electric Voting Machine (EVM), forms used to fill nominations for elections (how many of us have seen them?), forms to get a water connection, electricity connection. Hundreds of things come in when you think of it. And doing an experiment with all these things is not a difficult job for any average teacher.
Do I need to speak of History? Right from photocopies of original manuscripts to old newspapers to actual voice recordings of speeches of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are all available!
Social sciences leave a lot of scope on things to be experimented with. Kids could go on to the streets and collect data about what beggars feel about the government. I think its equivalent to collecting data about measuring resistance around Ohm’s law. If experiments in sciences are a lot about data collection then social sciences too has a lot to offer in terms of data collection.
The good news is that for a social sciences laboratory, you need not get a human skeleton - a human being would do…be it a beggar, a politician, a doctor, a bureaucrat… that’s something I will talk about in some other section of this book.