Great Works are Performed not by Strength but by Perseverance.

Great minds discuss IDEAS, average minds discuss EVENTS, small minds discuss PEOPLE.

With Honorable Deputy Director Education Shigar

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

ALWAYS BE POSITIVE...

LEAVE A LITTLE SPARKLE WHEREVER YOU GO.

Action is the fundamental key to all success.

How to apply for a job: CV & all that

IT is an established fact that `basic rules of business are universal`. It means there might be hundreds of thousands of techniques of doing a business but basic principles of a business is the same all over the world: whether it is a shop in BhaiPheru or a huge supermarket in New York.

Graduates cannot neglect or circumvent the current universally changing rules of making an application for an employment: writing a CV or a covering letter just because they are frustrated or lost hope in our social system for getting an employment and shortage of jobs creating a hitch in their success.

An ideal resume/CV and cover letter should be on one page each separately with the cover letter having not more than four paragraphs. In case of outstanding applicants with multiple degrees and several employment experiences, the resume/CV could go to maximum two pages.

My huge administrative and managements national and international, experience tells me that the majority of our university graduates and postgraduates adopt obsolete method of writing a resume/CV when they take a start with matriculation and go to the highest degree whereas the modern method internationally is in the descending order: highest degree (MA/MSc) first on top or to begin with. And don`t write Intermediate and matric education.

Why would the selector/interviewer be interested in knowing when you did your matriculation if the required education is postgraduation? Why would the selector be interested in your personal life: married, unmarried children, father`s name and domicile/PRC (if not applying for a government job)?

Subsequently, write your most recent/current employment first and then go in descending order. In the same manner, the interviewer might not be interested in knowing what were you doing in the years 1990 or 1995. He must be interested in knowing what are you today.

The company/organisation hiring you is interested in the following things:

1. What are you doing at present: your most recent assignment and organisation you are working for?

2. What is your educational qualification?

3. What could you deliver to the company? How could the company benefit from your education and experience?

The company is not interested in your personal life and obsolete stuff.

One last important point, many candidates are disqualified because of overqualifications. It happens when you are MSc, MA or BE and are applying for a smaller job. The interviewer/selector knows that in future whenever you get an employment of your choice, you will quit their job and so they don`t give you an opportunity where you are overqualified.

Here is a tip/trick to be smart. If you are so desperate, make two/three resumes: one for perfect opportunities that suit your education and experience, and the other showing only a graduate degree (BA/BSc) with one job experience, in case you have multiple academic qualifications and experience and a third resume/CV showing an Intermediate grade, even if you are applying for an entry level opportunity in utter frustration.

Do not ever use cyclostyled resumes available with photocopiers or other professionals on the street where top address place is lined blank to fill by a pen and rest contents go all in one.

This gives the first impression to the selector that you don`t have your own capability of writing and are used to dropping resumes in bulk everywhere without putting an effort and seriousness in it.

One Kind Word can Change Someone's Entire Life.

At the career crossroads

Today’s world focuses on more variety than what was offered to the previous generations. Take coffee for example … there are so many types of coffee to choose according to your taste and preference. Ice cream, which was available in maximum 10 flavors a few years ago, comes in hundreds of different flavors and combinations now. New cell phone models keep popping into the market everyday while giving us a greater variety to choose from. From lawn prints to cars, laptops or anything you can think of the variety is just growing giving us an astounding amount of choices today.

It goes the same for career. Gone are the days when medical and engineering were the only two options and the rest of the community was getting a simple honors degree just for the sake of an education. Today, there are courses, which you could never think of. Scanning the paper the other day, I noticed an undergraduate course in gems and jewelry. Now that sounds exciting!But the variety doesn’t end there as there’s still a long list ahead. From political science to anthropology, gender studies, media, photography, journalism, auctorial sciences, hotel management, geology, zoology … and the list never stops.

Fortunately a lot of these courses are being offered here in Pakistan, too, which gives us all a chance to study the subjects we always wanted to. Even though true liberal art education is still not very common in Pakistan, it is available at some places.

Degrees in social sciences are now being offered everywhere giving you the ease to study social science without even leaving your city.However, choosing your career is always a problem with such a great variety on offer in education. And you never actually realise it until you have to fill up your college applications, a bad time to choose your career. You need to start planning way before that for planning ahead of time helps you sift through all the confusion and conflicting choices. This makes it easier for you to choose the career that you can excel in. But choosing can be a tough task with so much variety at hand. So how do you find the most suitable career for yourself? Here are some things you need to consider before career planning.

Know thyself
The first step to choosing the best career for yourself is knowing yourself well. You might believe that you know yourself best but there is a chance that you just think you do. So before anything, make a list of what you like, your interests, habits, behavior and what kind of a person you generally are. It is very important to have a very good idea as to what your strengths and weaknesses are before embarking on a career. You can start short listing different careers once you have an idea of this.

Family preferences
No matter how much you say you don’t care about others and it’s your life; the ultimate truth is that you have to care about your family and those connected to you. Therefore planning a career is not an individual’s decision. Or let’s put it this way, it is your decision but you will have to know your family’s concerns and preferences. If they aren’t allowing something you want to do, then try to convince them about your interests. Tell them about why you want to join that particular career and how it can be good for you.

Striking a balance
Life keeps changing and we go through different phases of life which bring along a unique set of priorities and responsibilities.

A young graduate maybe ready to work from nine to five but a mother with a young child cannot devote so much of her time to work.

Hence while you plan a career, keep in mind of the different phases that are yet to come in your life. I am not saying to stay away from strenuous careers like medicine but make sure that your job is flexible if you have heavy responsibilities. Also, for that you will have to be adaptive and flexible to the changes that come your way. I have seen women who have an MBA and work in the corporate sector but when their responsibilities increase they take up lighter jobs such as teaching business or accounting at a high school. This way they keep working, earning a good amount of money and are also fulfilling their responsibilities at home without any problem. So striking a balance is highly important.

Researching your career choice
Before you hop into college for a degree in a particular field make sure you research well about it. Surf the Internet, go through the newspaper and get to know as much as you can about that career and the flexibilities it offers. Written material might not be so effective, so ask people you know who are in that field. Ask them about how their work is, how life has changed after they jumped in this specific career and whether they love the work they do because if you love your job you tend to spend a happy life and everything becomes easy. Try to learn from other people’s experiences and use this learning for your betterment.

Scope and interest
This is a major problem. People often choose careers because of scope and not interest. Now the problem with this is that they don’t like their careers and are just working because of the fat pay cheques they get. This is little motivation for a career, which you are supposed to pursue for a lifetime.

Think of it this way … what happens when you don’t need the money anymore and are done with all your needs? How will you work at that point in time? Furthermore, if today computer-related careers are in demand, chances are that so many people go into this field that some may become redundant. So never choose scope over your personal interests because if you follow your interests, you will end up doing a better job and will excel at it, too.

Monetary or mentally rewarding?

Different people work because of different motives. Most do it for money while some people do it for the mental satisfaction that comes with it. Others do it for passion and so on. So make sure you know your reason behind choosing a career.

If you just want to mint money, you can open up a general store and sell all kinds of consumer goods. If you want to show your creativity there are tons of fields for you including, interior/fashion designing, journalism, photography, film-making, etc. If you want to do something for society, join an NGO. But before you choose your career, you should know what you want from that career — money or satisfaction?

Your personality and the job
A boring person would never be perfect for a gossip magazine. Likewise, a jovial person wouldn’t seem that suitable in the role of a doctor at least not while he/she is at work. So make sure your personality matches with the type of career that you want to pursue.

Chances are if your personality matches with your career, you will end up doing a great job and will also love the tasks you are supposed carry out. If you love music and know a lot about it then join a radio station or join a band. If you have a passion for truth and justice then you should be a lawyer. So a career according to your personality and interests will work best for you.

METHODS OF INFLUENCE

We all want to have positive influence with certain people in our personal and professional lives. Our motives may be win new business, keep customers, maintain friendships, change behavior, or improve marriage and family relations.

But how do we do it? How do we powerfully and ethically influence the lives of others? There are three basic categories of influence: 1) to model by example (other see); 2) to build caring relationship (others feel); and 3) to mentor by instruction (others hear).

Talent is made, not born: Is innate intelligence highly over-rated in our society?

JOHN Mighton was not a born genius, in fact he was just an ordinary kid, who barely passed calculus in a first year university course and received disappointing marks in creative writing. Today, Mighton is an award-winning playwright, an author, the brain behind the pioneering knot and graph theory in mathematics and an internationally-recognised math teacher.Mighton attributes his success to years of rigorous training and holding a strong passion for what he does.

“People with expert abilities are generally made, not born and often their abilities arise out of a great deal of repetitive practice and imitation and copying of other peoples’ styles and ideas,” he said.“For instance, chess masters repeatedly play small sets of moves, memorise thousands of positions and obsessively study the games of the masters.”Mighton first studied philosophy at university, but his interest in writing and math reignited in the 1980s. “I read Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, and saw how she turned herself into a writer through sheer determination,” he said.At that point, Mighton went through rigorous self-training until he became proficient in writing poetry. His secret was to “break a task down into a series of steps” and practice until he became perfect. He followed the same strategy with math and years later pursued a PhD in mathematics from the University of Toronto.

Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues studied expert performances in soccer, surgery, piano playing, software design, writing, chess and other pursuits. Their findings proved that expert performers are nearly always made, not born. It is only when a task is repeated many times to perfection that people excel. However, the concept of deliberate practice emphasised by Ericsson, involves more than just repeating a task; it includes setting goals, obtaining necessary feedback, correcting past mistakes, and focussing on the process as well as the outcome.

Continued practice increases the production of myelin around our nerve fibres, explains Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code. Myelin is an insulated sheath that wraps nerve fibres and enhances signal strength, accuracy and speed. In turn, our sensory responses become more proficient and our thoughts more fluent.

“The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimises the circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become,” wrote Coyle.

Coyle’s findings also suggest that targeting the root cause of a problem by repetitious practice is effective because that’s the only way myelin will wrap around a circuit. “… the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option; it’s a biological requirement,” he wrote.

Since wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires a lot of time and energy, people must love what they do, otherwise they will never work hard enough to be great, according to Coyle.

DrNasrullahManji, a Harvard graduate and a gastroenterologist in the US, says that his passion for the life sciences coupled with hard work helped him reach his mark in life. “Any success comes with having the ability to use your skills and talents. And that only happens when you work really hard at it,” he said. He gave me the example of Michael Jordan, a former professional basket ball player, who practiced for hours a day to reach his pinnacle of success.

He believes high achievers usually possess a burning desire to go over and beyond the bare minimum in life and they often ask themselves the following question: “How can I design a better mouse trap? — How can I make this better?”

Patricia Lovett-Reid, senior vice-president at TD Waterhouse Canada Inc., an author and host of Money Talk, a personal finance show that runs on Business News Network in Canada, is another shining star who attributes her success to sheer determination, hard work and a passion for what she does. Lovett-Reid reached up a corporate ladder without having a university degree and being a single parent in her mid 30s.

Like Manji, Lovett-Reid is of the opinion that people must have the internal flame, that ‘can-do’ attitude in order to succeed. “There’s got to be something inside you that forces you to say: I’m going to do it,” she said. “Sometimes we have self-limiting beliefs about ourselves … and when we get out of our own way, the sky is the limit.”

When asked whether she believes in the phrase, practice makes perfect, she said: “I don’t believe in perfection, in fact perfection I think is delusional to some extent, but I do believe the more effort you put behind it, the better you will be at it. That takes time — that takes energy.”

She says it takes a certain amount of courage to follow one’s passions. “I often think about it [life] like a screenplay. If you think about a screenplay every once in a while there are pivotal moments where you can see the play can go in either direction and I think that’s the same way in life — it could go in either direction and it takes a lot of courage to not go down the safest path but to follow what you really believe in,” she said.

Though Lovett-Reid cautions that people should have a back-up plan in life — just in case Plan ‘A’ does not pan out, they at least have the option to resort to Plan ‘B’.

But is passion alone enough? Some kids can have passion oozing out of them, but unconducive school and home environments can hinder their self-confidence and affect their academic performance and in turn their chances of being successful. So what role can teachers and parents play to ensure passion is developed and nurtured in children?

Lovett-Reid says that children are by-products of their environments and it’s important that parents encourage kids to do their best — as that’s what really matters at the end of the day. “Every single day we’ve said to our children as they walked out the door: ‘We love you, have a great day, remember you don’t have to be the best, you sure have to do your best,’” she said.

According to Mighton, parents and teachers need to understand the psychological needs of children. “We believe guidance destroys creativity and understanding, but the research in cognition proves the opposite,” he said. “To teach someone you need to access what they know and don’t know and later fill in those remaining gaps.”

In 1998, Mighton created  (JUMP) — a free tutoring service in Toronto to help children achieve their full potential in the subject. His teaching principles focus on the same methods he’d used to teach himself; a teaching approach which involves breaking problems down into levels.

“When a student can succeed at something, I eventually create problems that look much harder but they are only simple extensions of the same idea,” he said. “So when a child successfully completes this harder problem, he is ecstatic.” By understanding children’s psychology, Mighton not only stimulates and challenges children, but also boosts their self-esteem.

Mighton’s first miracle student was close to failing grade eight math, a weakness reinforced by his teacher. But under the influence of Mighton’s teachings, the boy was later offered a scholarship at the University of Waterloo and pursued a PhD at another university.

Mary RenckJalongo in an article entitled, “Beyond benchmarks and scores: reasserting the role of motivation and interest in children’s academic achievement,” published in the Childhood Education publication in 2007, wrote: “If we want [children] to use their minds well, it is reasonable to help them understand how their minds function.”

Jalongo also points out how positive emotions often lead the way and they influence motivation, interest and ultimately, academic achievement — just as much as cognitive ability. A child needs to feel positive emotions such as happiness, excitement and a sense of challenge when he or she is learning, according to Jalongo.

But some critics may still argue that genes ultimately determine academic achievement and in turn talent and success. Surely, innate intelligence acquired through genes plays a role. But the question that still remains vague is: how much of a role do genes really play?

Young Mozart, for instance, displayed all the characteristics of a child prodigy. He successfully transcribed music after hearing it only once. But let’s not forget that the young musician also compulsively practiced. By his sixth birthday, Mozart had practiced 3,500 hours of music under the guidance of his mentor father, estimates Dr Michael Howe in his book Genius Explained.

Ample research suggests that passion, persistence and patience are all important ingredients to unleash talent. The findings above suggest that the learner must be self-motivated and have a desire to get better. And parents and teachers must act as strong supports along the way.

Mighton, in his book The End of Ignorance: Multiplying Our Human Potential wrote: “Like the chemical solution that changes colour with the addition of a single drop of reagent or the ant colony that begins to forage for food with the arrival of a few ants, the brain can acquire new abilities that emerge suddenly and dramatically from a series of small conceptual advances.”

The writer is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada.
ainemoorad@post.com

Teaching Basic Concepts of Information handling for relational understanding of mathematics

Introduction

As a mathematics teacher I began to teach the basic concepts of information handling during the visits in a private school of Karachi, Pakistan for grade VIII students. During these visits, I found the students learning with the instrumental understanding of mathematics while relational understanding was an issue for students. Instrumental understanding refers to the, where learners, only know the rules and methods to solve the given problem but are unable to answer why they are doing so.  Relational understanding where learners not only know what to do but also know why they are doing so. They connect the known concepts with the new concepts they are learning and can apply their learning in the real life experience (Skemp, 1991).  We group of three members visited the school to teach grade VIII students in three phases. During these visits I found them confused initially when I asked to make the groups and also asked to jot down the numbers of visits to shops to buy daily life requirements and cards were distributed among the students. During three visits students were taught data, raw data, processed data, ungrouped data, grouped data, class interval, class boundaries and frequency distribution table.

The main purpose of school visits was to explore the students learning mathematics and teaching of myself for relational understanding and get in-depth understanding of students and myself as a teacher. I expect to take on the role of a teacher and teacher educator in my school.

            In future I could utilized my findings and with the support of my school management, could promote student and teacher learning that might to the student and staff development and school improvement. This teaching and study would also give me a opportunity to go through the teaching process in my own context and contribute to the existing literature. 

Literature Review

            The purpose of this study is to explore how a teacher can enable students to learn with relational understanding and meaningful teaching for the teachers. I attempted to discuss available literature which helped me to develop an understanding of my topic and also provided me a framework for the study. Before discussing and going into the detail of what is relational understanding. It is appropriate to see what literature says about the term ‘Understanding’. Supporting this view Sierpinska says that the term understanding is very ambiguous and states:

The word understanding is used in very many forms and expressions ininformal speech. We say that a person ‘understands’ something, wespeak of a person’s ‘understanding’ something, and of the various understanding’ people may have. We also speak of ‘mutual understanding’,of somebody’s utterance or somebody’s writing, of “Understanding” a wordand an expression, a concept, a phenomenon. (P. 1)

            Sierpinska further argues that in educational setup the term ‘understanding’ has a meaning different from the usage of term in everyday language. He states that, understanding can be thought of an actual or potential mental experience” (P. 1).Relational understanding seems to be based on constructivist theory of learning. This theory claims that “conceptual knowledge can’t be communicated directly. It has to be constructed a new by every learner in his own mind”(Skemp,1991, p.203).

            Heibert and Carpenter (1992) state “a useful way of describing is in terms of a way an individual’s internal situations are structured” (p. 66). Cockcroft (1993) shares this view and adds that it is an integral state of mind which has to be achieved individually” (p.69). Dewy (1971) defines understandings as “grasping the meanings”. Selinger (1994), Jaworski (1994), Sierpinska (1994) and Ernest (2000) use the term understanding and learning interchangeably. For example Ernest (2000) argues that for learning we need to fully understand new ideas. Therefore learning can’t happen without understanding.

During the teaching of information handling in the school, I saw the students not responding when I asked about their monthly visits to shop as a question of prior knowledge review. Therefore, prior knowledge is most important factor in the construction of new knowledge. Caprio (1994) suggests that “students coming to us already have a set of experiences that have let them to develop cognitive structure through the way they interpret their environment.They have been dealing with the natural world with their own ideas” (p.210).

Implementation

In the first class, I found the students unaware with rationale understanding of mathematics. I found by asking probing questions from the students that they have no constructivist approach and conceptual understanding which are important for relational understanding. For second visit I planned a lesson such a way that students could able to understand the activities easily. For example, linking the previous lessons that how many their visits to the shop monthly. I allowed the students to jot down the visits on their notebooks and different number of visit I observed on their notebooks and I also jotted down on the blackboard. In the same way another activity was rolling the dices in groups on their table. I received the different numbers and also instructed to jot down the total numbers written on dices. Students in this school visit took very interest involving in activities. Students understood the activities and the data handling was interesting and were related to daily life experiences. They also realized the information handling is meaningful in their practical life. I felt a little confusion in our lesson planning and in the third visit of school, I re-planned making the activities according to the students’ level and linked to the previous activities. Before going to teach frequency distribution table, same data was categorize into intervals. For example, how many students are there visited (5-10) times to shop in a month, (11-15), (16-20) and up to (50-55) times in a month.In this activity students easily built-up the concept of class interval and frequency. If the students visit the shop 5 to 10 times are 7, then 7 will be the frequency of the class interval (5-10). The frequency is also represented by tally marks in second column. Number of tally marks were written which are frequencies of different class intervals.

Overall, a frequency table was drawn by the students. I also draw the frequency table on black board asked about table from the students and they were confortable at the end of school visits while doing information handling by activity based teaching and became familiar with relational understanding of mathematics. Students realized how and why information handling can be understood in our practical lives.

Findings

During the school visits I found myself to know about the conceptual, activity based teaching and relational understanding of mathematics. By the end of the visits studetns and teachers including me who were teaching in concern school and class were feeling more improvement in the teaching and learning process of information handling. In the beginning of school visits, students were reluctant while asking the questions in the class at the end of the visits studnets were comfrotabel while asking questions from the teachers.

About teachers of our group, I was feeling challenges in teaching mathematics relationally but after conducting activities and conceptual understanding of studnets, I also felt confortable while teaching in the class. For this, I though in the previous classes and reflected on the visit and re-planned to improve my teaching. For the relational understanding of the mathematics there was a lot of hard work and reflection on the previous visits was required to coop with the challenges of the relational understanding.

There is need to reduce the gap between teacher and student to teach mathematics relationally and also give the concreat material to teach information handling in the class. Students are required to encourage to raise more questions when they demanded while teaching information handlings. I used the strategy of student centered and activity based teaching during the school visits. In one of the school visits, I asked the studnets to jot the ages of their family members of each student in the class. I got the information regarding  their family members in terms of ages. The information got was raw data. Similarly, I again asked them to arrange the data from smallest to largest number. Students performed this activity easily and they also divided into the class intervals of (1-10)years, (11-20)years up to (41-50)years. They knew how information handling can be arranged and why it is meaningful for them. Students thought information handling is used in our own practical life. For example, number of scores in different tests of the studnets family represented by frequency distribution table. This was a relational understanding of mathematics that studnets came to understand how were they doing and why. In the beginning of the school visits, I observed that questions raised by sutdnets were not about the understanding concept, but they were only about how to write and solve the exercises in their registers. During the second visit of the school, a mathematics teacher was also present behind the class. When I asked question before starting the topic as prior knowledge test, some students were giving answers about the class interterval and frequency according to their own conception. During that activity, math’s teacher of the school was strict to a student while answering the question. The attitude of the teacher reflected that students were used to instrumental understanding not relational understanding of mathematics. At the end of the visit we took some reflections of the studnets and their class teachers. Both teacher and students responded that they had never compare this topic information handling with concrete material and practical examples. There is need of relational understanding of mathematics in our schools, particularly when the level goes up to the higher grades, the relational understanding of mathematics declines for the sake of completing syllabus and passing exams.

Conclusion

It is concluded that during the visits of a private school of Karachi, Pakistan, I found some teaching strategies and innovative methods are needed to plan and implement in schools when the basic concepts of information handling are taught. Teaching strategies should be students centered and based on relational understanding of mathematics. I learnt about the students in the school that there are use to instrumental understanding and teacher centered class. There was also a method of teaching by talk and chalk. By the studnets responses it is clear there was no concept of group work, cooperative learning, teaching by audio visual aids and conceptual teaching for the relational understanding of the mathematics while teaching the basic conpts of information handling.

Students were needed teaching on activity base in information handling because studnets would be able to retain the fundamental concept of information handling and interest would be developed. By the visits of school in Karachi during the teaching of basic concepts of information handling it is said that we required students encourage and develop the sense of conceptual and relational understanding of mathematics.

Furthermore, information handling based on activities and relational understanding of studnetsalso improve the teaching skills of the teachers. Relational understanding plays a vitial role in information handling to make meaningful the lives of studnets because this discipline is very useful and implacable in pratical life. 

Leadership is action, not a position.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way.

Life is a journey, not a destination.

Education is the great engine of development.

DO NOT STOP UNTIL YOU ARE PROUD.

It is always beneficial to learning when students are motivated by interest.

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.

You learn something every day if you pay attention.

Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

KEEP YOUR HEELS, HEAD AND STANDARDS HIGH.

I am very thankful to the God for giving me an opportunity to reached out more than 250 teachers to enhance their capacities in 2017.

There are two great days in a person's life, the day we are born and the day we discover why.

The greatest moment I have in my life is the day when I chose teaching as my career.

By helping others you learn how to help yourselves.

Just because you are right, does not mean I am wrong.

Instead of judging people by their past, stand by them and help repair their future.

Life is amazing, sometime you interview candidates and sometime you are interviewed as a candidate

Leadership is inspiring others to follow your vision/direction/dream.

Good leadership starts with good communication

We need to educate our children for their future "not for our past".