Useful Printable Templates for Year 2015

Wishing my readers a very Happy New Year 2015!

With the New Year coming, we all wanted printable formats and templates to help us organise ourselves and our life. 

Here are my top 5 useful printable formats and templates for Year 2015.

You can download them as pdf files and print it out for your use, all free of cost. 

1. Calendar: Everybody needs a calendar - for work and for life. Here is a simple calendar for Year 2015 in horizontal and vertical format. 

2. Planning: 

3. Goal setting:

4. To-do list:

5. Resume/ CV: 

5 Steps to Getting Things Done

Trying to figure out better ways to getting things done, I explored few tools and systems to increase my productivity.
Here I am detailing 5 steps - processes to getting things done.
1. Capture: Creating a list of things that needs to be done is a good start. First it takes the burden on memory. It could be as simple as list of things to do for the day or master list of things you want to do in a lifetime.
2. Categorize: I found prioritizing based on importance doesn't seem to work for me. So I suggest prioritizing based on 'urgency' (One Minute Things to Do) as 'Critical Now', 'Opportunity Now' and 'Someday later'.
3. Break: Now the list of items you have put in may be not actionable. So I suggest breaking them to an apt level so you can take act upon it. This gives clarity of action and feels that we can conquer the list
4. Do: Now this is critical part. Now that you know 'what' do it and 'how' to do it - get dirty to do it. Act upon your to do list. Ensure that the first 3 stages don't exhaust you and you have enough breath to step on the gas - now do it.
5. Review: Once in a while, reviewing the list you have done gives you motivation. I use iDoneThis to track on what I completed. I prefer to keep it at 3 things that I got done. And honestly, though I might have more 3 on my to-do list that day, I get to finish only 3 and that's ok. There is always tomorrow.

All the best for your productivity too.
And get your things done not the other way around!

How to book an LPG gas connection in India?

For a new family or newly married couple who is starting a new home, one of the critical thing is to get gas connections. Here I am explaining certain procedures on how to get your gas connection from my own experience.

There are 3 gas companies in India that provide LPG connection:

• Bharat Gas
• HP Gas
• Indane Gas

There are nodal private distribution agencies to supply gas connections to each locality.

Step 1: Identify the most popular gas connection in your neighbourhood. Ask your neighbour and get the connection

Step 2: You will need your ID proof, photo, residence proof (Rent agreement)

Step 3: Go directly to the gas agencies and ask for the procedure.

Step 4: Fill the form and get your connections ready

Advice: Try to get an additional gas cylinder so it serves as the buffer for you to wait for the next replacement. Usually the price ranges from Rs.7000-9000 for one gas connections. 

My Tiny Habits Experiment

Dear fellow traveler,

As I have just enrolled myself in the TinyHabits Weekly program for the 3rd week, I am sharing few of my successes and additional resources I am pursuing in my Habit Formation process.

1. Success with Tiny Habits: While BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits program allows for setting and tracking only 3 habits per week, I had my own long list of to do habits (however on 'After I do ___, I will ____' format). On the second week, I had success with the 3 of those Tiny Habits:

• After I pee, I will do 2 squats
• After I get up after lunch, I will open my fridge door
• After I step in to my house, I will kiss my wife passionately

And yes, I am doing secretly doing squats after I pee. Opening my fridge door was intentionally to build the habit of drinking a cup of Tropicana fruit juice after the lunch. And not just the Tiny Habit, but drinking a cup of Tropicana fruit juice has become a habit. In fact, when the Tropicana can was over, my mind ensured that I buy the next set of cans so as to accomplish this Tiny Habit. And I am feeling lot closer with my wife. Except for the first habit, rest of them became natural - reason is that doing 2 squats is trying to expand to doing a full-stretch exercise routine. 

2. Getting Things Done: Have recently explored David Allen's GTD Method. Though it sounds a complicated process, I found the first and second step to be extremely useful: a. Capture b. Categorising. I am now capturing my fleeing thoughts in place, though I didn't mind it being an idea, or a life-long goal or a daily task. It just gets captured in my list. I transport the necessary into the Things-to-do list later in the beginning of the day. Naturally I categorise those I can immediately do (make a phone call & get updates), or spend a considerable amount of time (prepare the Progress report), etc. I cut down the tasks that gets completed both from my TTD list and my Capture list. 

3. Things to do list: I have been in the habit of formulating a list of things that I need to do everyday in the morning at work. I try to prioritize as much as I can (eat the frog/ get the low-hanging fruit). I check it off as I complete; if I can't I drag it to the next day of work. There are ad-hoc things that come in that may require immediate attention. I take it up, finish it and just continue to do the task on my to-do list. As mentioned before, I use my GTD Capture list to feed into my TTD list.

And thus the journey continues. 

I will share in more such experiments - both success and failure to help you guide your life. 

Warm regards,

Sathya

Getting That Habit Right

For quite sometime, I have been trying to master the art of habit formation. Slowly I discovering a pattern with myself on mastering it both by experimenting on myself and reading. 

I struck goldmine when I explored and experimented with Dr.BJ Fogg's TinyHabits program. A Professor at Stanford University, USA and an experimental psychologist by education, Dr.Fogg explicitly details the way behavior change happens. 

Not only theorizing upon his new found knowledge, he also conducted a little experiment to exploit it for the benefit of others. He runs an online accountable program on his website to help you learn the patterns of forming a new habit, decide upon one and do it as part of his 1-week program (You can join it here). 

While exploiting this online program, I also explored other avenues on 'what' on habits. Concepts of SlightEdge and the remarkably similar book Compound Effect validates this assumption on starting small, making minor course correction to achieve the greater good. 

What will be the most effective and popular habits? Those followed by the highly successful, super rich, effective etc. This lead me to discover that the topmost priority for most of us were Health Habits, followed by Relationship building and Productivity Habits. 

My previous reading and self-improvement experiments (on principles developed by Dr.Stephen R.Covey, Jack Canfield, etc) lead me discover 4 key essential areas in one's life:

1. Health: aka Physical fitness, Stamina, Food habits, Weight, etc

2. Relationship: Encompassing the emotional aspect of our life - love relationship, kinship, etc

3. Productivity

4. Philanthropy

5. Spiritual

This is where I had the clash of content between the two most buzzwords in Productivity Literature - Habits v/s Goals. I discovered that clarity when I learnt about them from James Clear. 

While Goals define a target, a destination to be reached, Habits refer to the lifestyle behavior one needs to do practice to achieve those target. This simple clarify helped me distinguish between those and merge those to help me create that process. 

While people like Covey, Canfield helped me define the what, James Clear, Fogg helped to navigate the process of how to achieve the what.

This clearly defined I must deliberately explain you the last one which I actually searched first. The process of tracking one's progress and believe the web is loaded with such information. Tactics like - Seinfeld's Don't Break the Chain, GoalTracker apps, Ben Franklin's book on tracking 13 Virtues etc were to be considered as helping the process.

But one should remember that this is the last one in the whole process: Review & Reflection. And I don't demean it anytime soon. Though I wrongly believed that having a foolproof tracking system will help me achieve the goals, I soon realised that it may be also necessary.

Now with my 'what' and 'how' clear I am using the Review systems to reflect upon my progress over the week. For me daily tracking doesn't seem work. James Clear calls this Backward approach, where at the end of week one reflects and reviews upon the 'Habits' one was suppose to do to achieve the overarching ultimate 'Goals'. 

Again after trying out few web apps, I am contentful with an excel sheet that tracks my Habits as I decided to do. 

I am getting in form now, I am doing regularly doing exercise, got a chance to deliberately build practices/ habits to strengthen my family life, made lifestyle changes (though minor) to improve my nutritious uptake and also develop my productivity. 

I hope to share more such experiments in my later blogs. 

Take care,

Sathya 

Decentralisation: a Panacea for Reform Movements and A necessity for Third Wave Development

Alvin Toffler in his book mentions five systematic effects that the Industrial revolution or the Second wave created. One of them is the system of Centralisation. He mentions about the system of ‘centralising’ power production that is depended on fossil fuels and non-renewable sources. I would like to the take the alternative view if we were to remedy the system. Instead of having a centralized power production we could have the ‘decentralised’ power production. This also reduces and takes away the issue of massive grid system and power distribution problem.

The current renewable energy sources like Solar system, Wind mills, Biogas plants could be used to materialize the vision of having a ‘decentralised’ power system.

Not just the power system, we could also imagine the possibility of having a ‘decentralised’ food production system and ‘decentralised’ sanitation and water system.

We already have the technology to implement such systems. The idea of ‘Kitchen gardens’ and roof top gardening, backyard poultry can considerably reduce our dependency on factory model of agriculture. More importantly it will help us produce healthy foods. It is scientifically proven that the small-scale farms are far more efficient in their production than large scale farms. We should learn from this.

                                               

Similarly, our city systems have massive centralized water supply and sanitation systems. If we could harvest rainwater on our rooftops and also find a way to implement a small decentralized waste water treatment plants, it will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Currently, we are spending so much money in creating infrastructures for wastewater drainage systems. And a lot more money is required for the management and maintenance of such systems. But decentralization could save us completely and totally.

Besides this we are also witnessing the need to decentralize democracy, considering the fact that the concept of ‘nation’ was an invented phenomenon. Can we create a governance system where local government is given the authority to devise and implement their own community initiatives, while the central government could serve an integrating and regulating authority rather than being anything else? This was already tried out in a state-level micro-planning exercise done at Kerala facilitated by the Center for Development Studies, Trivandrum.

Similarly, in the field of management, given the extend of globalization happening at massive scale, companies are fast learning to lead their employees and manage their business as network of smaller companies, again the concept of ‘decentralisation’ in play.

We may have to seriously consider the way we manage our resources; and given the lessons learnt from the First World, it is necessary that the Third World makes more wiser decision both for its economy and common good. Decentralisation is one such way. 

Current understanding on Assessment

It is surprising to know that, in the months of March-April, around 2.2 million students appeared for their X and XII public exams (and this is only the CBSE boards without including the State boards), making the Indian Examination system the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.

With such a staggering amount of population appearing for exams, it is necessary for us to look at ‘standard’ of such tests being conducted and henceforth its necessity and utility. Particularly I like to share my current understanding on the assessment, which was inspired by article I read an article on recently conducted Finnish Matriculation by Pasi Sahlberg.

At the premise, I want to question myself whether raising assessment standards can increase education excellence; and it is not as simple as setting tough question papers. And at the same time, I would like to declare that it doesn’t mean assessment standards are panacea for our bad education system. And at the same time, as mentioned in the Sahlberg’s article (which I highly recommend to read before continuing), we may have to be conscious of how this assessment is used, on teacher-designed assessments in the younger classes, one-time nation-wide assessment only when the children attain the age of 14 and be mindful that I am not supporting a mindless aristocratic system which rather than being progressive in nature, reduces the trust on the teachers.

Evidences

Given this common understanding, I like to put forth the evidences I particularly happen to witness in coming to such a judgment. However ill-informed or misunderstood I might be, I want this article to challenge the existing reforms in the Education sphere and invite more such constructive discussion on the same.

Ø  We are recently witnessing a visible decline in the quality of Engineering graduates in Tamil Nadu. Though a variety of reasons could be cited, experience faculty and trainers seem to site the cancellation of TNPCEE (Tamil Nadu Professional College Entrance Exams) in the year 2005. I personally took coaching classes on the same and remember it testing the conceptual understanding of the students rather than on rote learning usually being done in the regular public exams.

Ø  Visible difference in the high standard of Engineers, Doctors coming out of IIT/ Medical colleges because of the high standard of assessment set in the entrance exams like IIT-JEE, All India Entrance Exams, etc. Again a high standard of assessment ensuring quality intake into the colleges and henceforth better graduates

Ø  Recent trend in UPSC exams introducing high standard aptitude test, C-SAT (Civil Services Aptitude Test) to ensure quality placement, besides the knowledge-based assessments

Ø  Another example are the list of qualifying exams like IIM-CAT exams, GMAT, TOEFL, IELTS which on a scale tests the quality of intakes

Ø  Plethora of placement tests conducted for recruiting graduates (again testing aptitude and thinking skills) into the industry

Ø  We do have specialized tests and assessment like entrance test for B.Arch and test at National Institute of Design – are all assessments at different level to recruit specific type of candidates that the course demands

Here we should be mindful that assessment is not just quantitative or written measures; we may have to bring back our forgotten tradition of conducting oral assessment (one of the best and only way to assess students’ language and communication skills), literally like interviews for children.

What is the standard of assessment?

Quoting from the book, Driven by Data by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, listed here are series of questions basically trying to test the students’ understanding on percentages.

1. What is 50% of 20?
2. What is 67% of 81?
3. Shawn got 7 correct answers on his science test out of ten possible. What percentage of questions did he answer correctly?
4. J.J.Redick was on pace to set a college basketball record in career free throw percentage. Going into the NCAA tournament in 2004, he had made 97 of 104 free throw attempts. What percentage of free throws had he made?

And the list goes on to 6 different types of questions. As it is clear, the assessment has the power to test however aptly the conceptual understanding of the students on the topic. Elsewhere I have written an article on Assessment in Constructive teaching taking inspiration from Mr.Rajendran’sbook Inikkum Kanakku.

Analysing the above questions will help us understand the current problems in our own system. We, in India, are always citing the lack of conceptual and practical application in our Mathematical education. I suppose level 3 and 4 questions tries to address that issue and at the same time challenges the formula-substitution method of Maths instruction insider our classroom. Such varying degrees of assessments are called ‘Scaffolded assessments’ denoting the increasing level of complexity it requires to solve the questions.

What increasing assessment standards can do?

Immediately, increasing the standard of assessments challenges the teachers to increase their level of instruction to address the conceptual understanding (like in Question 4) rather than to be satisfied with procedural instructions (like in Question 1 or 2). No, I am not suggesting that this alone will do, but this is a good place to start.

At the same time, questions on how such increase in standards can be achieved in a subject like English. I found answer in the Maharashtra State Board’s English exam question paper and the Finnish English Matriculation exam. Here English is tested on a different level rather than asking the students to reproduce a memorized lines of Shakespeare or re-narrate an episode from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Here English is tested at comprehension level and critically on the students’ understanding of the given text. Also, certain companies like Educational Initiatives, Science Olympiad Foundation, etc are bringing about novel initiatives in raising the assessment standards like producing high quality test materials like ASSET, National Math/ Science Olympiad.

Issues to handle

At the same time, we too end up in falling into the trap of teaching for the test or coaching for the exams happens. But I am wondering, if we could somehow navigate the issue some other way.

We should remember that assessment is everywhere. You will not be allowed to drive your car, if you are not ‘tested’ for your driving skills or one doesn’t want to sit in a plane without a licensed pilot. While these assessments are test of skills, can we also recommend using assessment only as a test of skill and knowledge in our education too? The question still lingers.    

How to make a child write story

How to develop the necessary skills to help children write a story? The pragmatic linear approach asks us to detail the necessary steps to master the skill of writing story. But telling children like – “Do you know how to write a story? First you have to…” doesn’t work.

There is another way of looking at. “There should be an interest to write story – a need to write one. A child shouldn’t be conscious that she/he is learning to write the story. They themselves should discover the necessary characteristics in making a story.” If we are working under this paradigm how can we teach children about writing story? We know that if we give them the knowledge of how to write a story, it will stay as information and it may go away. But if there was an opportunity for the children to discover it for themselves, the knowledge gained may be deeper and will help them apply in new situations.

So let us see how to make that happen:

• Narrate a story and stop the story in a place where it peaks their interest [Suddenly there was a knock at the door… And the running race started…]
• Ask the children to predict what happens next in the story and ask them to write it. ‘Do you know what happened next?’ ‘Can you guess who won the race?’ ‘Can you write what happens next?’ [Here the children write the story without knowing steps to write one. They are writing on their own as they wish]
• Now to check who has written properly, we can introduce the story which will have all the essentials of writing a story.
• Let the children read the ‘exemplar’ story
• They compare their story with this story. Then, give them chance to correct their own stories based on the ‘exemplar’.
• Can help others evaluate their stories so as to improve it.
• If we repeat this exercise two or three times, the children get the nuances of writing a story without being taught.
• Here, the children had taught themselves how to write a story, the teacher merely facilitated the process by providing a situation for that. (Remember: To create an interest in a concept/ subject of discussion should be the main aim of a teacher.)

What ET can do for Education

Students can have real time feedback whether the answer is right or not

There is no authority figure when a computer teachers a child – automatic transition from being taught to learning by myself happens

Easy to train/ equip a computer rather than train a teacher

Physical and cognitive workload of a teacher reduces – she/he now no more have to ‘perform’ every day in and day out

Teacher becomes facilitator of a pre-programmed structure

Automatic M&E of students’ performance

Reduces teachers’ work

• Don’t have to invent questions or design assessments
• Don’t have to correct test papers and track students’ progress
• Don’t have to be a content expert (Can teach the topic without knowing the subject)
• Can teach English without knowing English (becomes less teacher dependent)

How to make a child write story

(Adopted from Tamil Amuthu by Mr.G.Rajendran)

How to develop the necessary skills to help children write a story? The pragmatic linear approach asks us to detail the necessary steps to master the skill of writing story. But telling children like – “Do you know how to write a story? First you have to…” doesn’t work.

There is another way of looking at. “There should be an interest to write story – a need to write one. A child shouldn’t be conscious that she/he is learning to write the story. They themselves should discover the necessary characteristics in making a story.” If we are working under this paradigm how can we teach children about writing story? We know that if we give them the knowledge of how to write a story, it will stay as information and it may go away. But if there was an opportunity for the children to discover it for themselves, the knowledge gained may be deeper and will help them apply in new situations.

So let us see how to make that happen: 

• Narrate a story and stop the story in a place where it peaks their interest [Suddenly there was a knock at the door… And the running race started…]

• Ask the children to predict what happens next in the story and ask them to write it. ‘Do you know what happened next?’ ‘Can you guess who won the race?’ ‘Can you write what happens next?’ [Here the children write the story without knowing steps to write one. They are writing on their own as they wish]

• Now to check who has written properly, we can introduce the story which will have all the essentials of writing a story.

• Let the children read the ‘exemplar’ story

• They compare their story with this story. Then, give them chance to correct their own stories based on the ‘exemplar’.

• Can help others evaluate their stories so as to improve it.

• If we repeat this exercise two or three times, the children get the nuances of writing a story without being taught.

Here, the children had taught themselves how to write a story, the teacher merely facilitated the process by providing a situation for that. (Remember: To create an interest in a concept/ subject of discussion should be the main aim of a teacher.)