Delving into the past

 Amma wanted a new notebook. I remembered an old one of mine in which I had made my notes in the last years of teaching. I had abandoned my large files by then. A realization had sunk in that no research and accessing newer and more books were necessary given the low IQ and pathetic application by students.

I thought I had just scribbled some points in short in the long notebook and it was mostly empty. The blank pages would be useful now. So I took out the book with flourish and had a look before handing it over.

I was in for a surprise. The book had notes for two subjects - one from the beginning and the other from the end and some middle pages were blank.

Instead of scribbled notes, I found a printout of the latest syllabus glued on the first page. There were some newspaper clippings, also neatly glued. There were some old, large print advertisements which I had used to show a simple way of analyzing them to the students. One slip of paper had a small exercise of match the pairs. There was a very old Forum of Free Enterprise booklet about the ideal corporate HR policy.

I was thrilled! I remembered those moments of preparation and also the classroom time. Students had found them meaningful. I remain a great believer in assignments and classroom work for students.

I found it difficult to part with those papers. But I had to. The past is not coming back nor will classroom teaching as I practiced it remain there. Still, I had made sincere efforts and their evidence was gratifying.

The way we work

Mindset, the new psychology of success by Carol Dweck, 2006

It is often seen that bright students in school lose their early spark and lead ordinary life while others with average ability in early life become real achievers later. Why does this happen?

According to Dweck, an American psychologist, the reason is mindset. She distinguishes between fixed and growth mindset and says that the former is governed by the desire to look smart while the latter desires to learn. The progress of the two [VJ1]  is as follows.

Attribute	Fixed mindset	Growth mindset
Challenges	Avoided	Embraced
Obstacles	Give up in the face of obstacles	Persist in spite of setbacks
Effort	See it as fruitless	Path to mastery
Criticism	Ignore useful negative feedback	Learn from criticism
Success of others	Found threatening	Source of lessons and inspiration
Result	Reach an early plateau and achieve less than potential. Deterministic view of world.	Reach ever higher levels of achievement. Experience greater sense of free will.

 

I pondered over this. Applied to some puzzles around me and now they are no puzzles. I feel I have gained an important insight with the above.

---

 [VJ1] 

What ho!

 Put the lock down period to some use by writing Empire - a novel on the life of memsahibs in India in the late 19th century. The style of writing is old; developments are few but characters' responses are covered in greater detail. Hackneyed plot of 3 friends travelling to India on a liner. Mixed facts and fiction. Enjoyed myself writing it.

Published it on Amazon KDP -Kindle direct publishing - as both an e-book and a paperback.

How to bring it before people? I have stopped short of running a promotion campaign on Amazon.

Thought I'd recommend it to Arlington Heights Memorial Library and British Library whose collection I access regularly.

AHML used a subterfuge: "We acquire only books of local members with an active library card." Their collection has all the established authors.

From my account of British library, I tried to put in a new purchase request. It did not get forwarded. So I sought a clarification. "Only UK authors." I was told.

The animosity baffled me. I was not trying to influence their purchase decision in any way.

So self-published books on KDP are not taken seriously. For all the democratization of publishing ushered in by Amazon, old prejudices die hard.

Back after a long time

 Thought of copy-pasting all the entries in the blog. My brother had suggested a program for converting the blog into a word document but I could not manage it.

Copy-pasting has taken a long time. Once I learnt that I had to place the mouse on selected blog matter and make a right click on the top most right point of the mouse for copying it, work went fast but before that I had struggled over the issue for 3 or 4 days.

There are 71 posts in all and less than 10 comments. Most of the posts are about new books, movies and some college activities - the sum of my life since 2012.

However, the entries made me feel nice. I felt connected with those moments on the basis of which I wrote the entries.

I had spent some time in designing and beautifying my blog. I used to change the pictures and the layout regularly. That portion could not be copied.

Still, it will be worthwhile going through all the entries, making minor corrections to avoid duplication and prepare a print-out. I will like to dip into it as and when I fancy it.

And of course, I have rediscovered my blog after nearly a year. I will have to visit it regularly.