Fiction Weekly Independent Reading Log (4: Fill & Download for Free

The Child Centered Classroom was a great sounding idea when it was introduced. After all, if we could make school less boring and meet children where they were, wouldn’t that result in better learning outcomes?The idea is that if your emphasize collaboration, social-emotional learning and giving students a voice in how or what they learn they will be more engaged and not only learn more, but learn more deeply. In the child centered classroom, the adult doesn’t so much teach, but creates an environment where the students teach themselves and each other. Ideally, the student’s learning is driven by their interests.Thinking about my own interests from middle and high school, I’m not sure how my interests would have made appropriate subjects of learning.The problem with the child-centered educational model is that in just doesn’t work. As Mathew Hunter pointed out in Standpoint Magazine,Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down - StandpointThe progressive orthodoxy in British education has left one in five school-leavers functionally illiterate. That ethos needs to changehttps://standpointmag.co.uk/features-june-12-child-centred-learning-has-let-my-pupils-down-matthew-hunter-a-s-neil-plowden-free-schools/“Nowadays, child-centred learning is an article of faith in the state sector. Whenever I question it at work I am met with bemusement at best, but usually righteous anger. Its principles pervade everything a new teacher hears about “best practice”: avoid chalk-and-talk; don’t point out a child’s mistakes (it will harm his self-esteem); never teach anything pupils may find boring; and never, on any account, organise the pupils’ desks in rows. Islands of desks where the pupils can “group learn” are dogmatically promoted.The faults in this pedagogical outlook are normally obvious to those who have not been through the indoctrination of teacher training. By moving the onus of authority from the teacher to the child, we neglect our responsibility for teaching, which is to prepare a child for the adult world. If a child directs his own learning, his potential for advancing from the condition of childhood is unsurprisingly diminished.As Keynes might well have written, practical teachers who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct educationist. The great tragedy of this process is that once released from the ivory tower and transferred to the classroom level, child-centred education becomes less a philosophy, and more an excuse for slack, ineffective teaching. If a teacher does not have a responsibility to direct the pupils’ learning, then this is a ready justification for the directionless, chaotic atmosphere in so many of our nation’s classrooms. On the ground, child-centred learning is an ideology of low expectations.”One of the biggest flaws with the child-centered approach is it’s over-emphasis on group work. Too often, at-risk students can fall through the gaps because other students carry them.In my science classes, the lowest performing students treat group activity time as a recess to socialize through, then copy the answers from someone else at the very end.In my district, elementary and middle schools place a huge emphasis on collaboration. The net result is that I find students coming to my high school classes woefully unprepared for any sustained individual mental effort.There’s also a definite lack of basic knowledge and skills. Recently, I started noting the words that my high school students didn’t know the meaning of, or simply had trouble reading:divergeconvergeboundaryglaciercontinentreassembleaquaticcoastalplumemalleablecharacteristicAnd that was in just the last 2 weeks. This year ’ve had high school students who seem unfamiliar with the idea of a percent. These are all students who’ve had at least 9 years of formal education, much of that time working in groups.I’m also a bit dubious of the idea that we should be specifically teaching “emotional intelligence.” We don’t need to teach emotional intelligence to help students develop that trait. We just need to do 2 simple things:(1) Encourage students to read novels.Numerous studies have shown that reading novels improves emotional Intelligence in people. Numerous studies review by psychology professor David Dodell-Feder and assistant professor Diana Tamir showed that reading fiction improved emotional intelligence.“…they reviewed 14 studies that examined whether reading fiction, compared with reading nonfiction or not reading at all, had a measurable effect on subjects' empathy. Empathy was measured in a variety of ways, including the ability to read other people's expressions, to see things from other people's perspectives, and to guess how others would feel in different situations. The empathy improvement was small but statistically significant, and it was repeated across different studies and different ways of measuring empathy.It's an important finding, Art Markman, PhD, head of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program at the University of Texas, Austin,​ writes on Psychology Today's website. As he notes, subjects in the experiments generally read (or didn't read) for only a brief period of time before their empathic abilities were measured. Since that brief bit of reading fiction was enough to make an immediate difference, it seems likely that those who read fiction on a regular basis would see a sustained and perhaps more significant improvement in their ability to empathize and emotional intelligence.”I’ve been teaching for 20 years. As recently as 10 years ago, before and after school you could find more introverted students reading a book. It was common for a student who finished their assignment early to pull out a novel and read until the bell rang. When Harry Potter was at its peak, I had to rush around and make sure certain kids actually did their work, and didn’t just write down any old answer so they could get back to the adventures of wizards and muggles. Those days are gone. I don’t think I’ve seen a student reading a non-assigned novel in a couple years. And I rarely see a student pull out the odd copy of a novel assigned for English classes.If you want to improve emotional intelligence, you need to set aside part of the school day for students to read fiction. But you also need to create an atmosphere were they don’t have alternatives. That leads me to my secod recommendation.(2) Don’t allow distracting electronics on campus.Electronics in general, and smart phones in particular lowers emotional intelligence in Kids. Trying to teach a course in Emotonal Intelligence in a class, where 80% of the kids have smart phones is like using a bucket to bail water out of a boat with a gaping hole. Dr. Daniel Coleman quite literally wrote the book on Emotional Intelligence.Now a lot of our students are glued to their phones for hours a day. It makes sense because apps like texting, as well as all social media sites, are designed to be addictive. According to Business Insider, Instagram and Facebook are intentionally conditioning you to treat your phone like a drug. So strong is the draw of social media that adults can’t resist them. Kids don’t stand a chance. So the kids are sucked in.And once sucked into the world of electronic addiction, they rob children and teens of the ability to naturally interract with others. According to Dr. Goleman, this is what technology does to people in general.1. Undermines Self-awarenessMore time on technology means less time with your own thoughts and feelings, the beating heart of mindfulness. As tech dependency increases, kids live in a state of self-alienation, estranged from their emotional selves, disabling self-awareness and self-reflection. Instead of thoughtful choices, they grow more reactive and less reflective.2. Weakens Self-regulationResearch has proven tech dependence increases impulsivity and lowers frustration tolerance. Without developing the ability to self-regulate, kids remain emotionally immature and mired in early childhood behaviors such as bullying, temper tantrums and angry outbursts.3. Diminishes Social skillsEven when kids play games online with others, such faceless relationships rarely lead to true friendships. In this way, tech dependence tends to breed isolation and reclusiveness. The more tech dominates, the less community develops. This leaves kids with poor coping skills and limited tools for navigating relationships.4. Undermines EmpathyWhen screen time replaces family or friend time, kids move through the world in trance-like states, self-absorbed and detached from others. Unempathic and unsympathetic, they lack attunement and rapport. The basic building blocks of healthy compassion remain underdeveloped.5. Stunts MotivationMotivation toward achieving personal goals in life, which requires drive, sustained attention and high levels of frustration tolerance, declines rapidly. Like any addict, as kids become more dependent, they start to neglect themselves and their future. Watch what happens when tech addicted kids are suddenly forced to interact with the world. They quickly grow discontented and irritable. That’s because, unlike technology, they can't control the real world or the people in it. As a result, when faced with difficult life choices, tech dependent kids are likely to suffer symptoms of anxiety or depression.If we really wanted to improve emotional intelligence, we would ban phones, I-pods and tablet devices from school grounds. Students will hate this choice the same way smokers hated it when we barred cigarettes from airplane and resteraunts. But they will get used to it and the time the 6 or 7 hours a day where they have absolutely no access to texting, gaming, taking selfies or checking in with Snapchat or Instagram will be a huge benefit to their emotional intelligence.Girls will benefit more from this policty as, in the words of Time Magazine, Social Media hurts girls more than boys. The Guardian has reported that Depression in girls is linked to higher use of social media. The Independent has reported that Teenage girls twice as likely to be depressed due to social media than boys.It found that 12 percent of light social media users and 38 per cent of heavy social media users, defined as those who use it for five or more hours a day, showed signs of having more severe depression.Previous studies have also concluded that social media can cause depression and anxiety in teenagers.The UCL study however highlighted that girls are considerably more likely to be affected. It found that two fifths of 14-year-old females used it for more than three hours per day compared with one fifth of boys. Only 4 per cent of girls reported not using social media compared to 10 per cent of boys.A quarter of girls showed signs of clinically relevant depressive symptoms compared to 11 per cent of boys, the study found.I could go on and on on the mental health harm done to teenagers by social media. If schools could create an atmosphere where, for a mere 7 hours a day, they were 100% cut off from social media and distracting screen, we would go a log way towards improving the emotional intelligence of students.

“Reading is an escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.” - Nora EphronHere is the list of best websites which feed minds with some intellectually stupendous and staggering content.The Atavist Magazine: The Atavist Magazine publishes one blockbuster nonfiction story each month. The magazine is constituted from a wide network of writers, fact-checkers, designers, illustrators, and more.Pocket: Log In : Pocket was founded in 2007 by Nate Weiner to help people save interesting articles, videos and more from the web for later enjoyment. Once saved to Pocket, the list of content is visible on any device — phone, tablet or computer. It can be viewed while waiting in line, on the couch, during commutes or travel — even offline.The Browser: Every day it read hundreds of articles and select the finest five, so you'll always have something to read on the train and interesting things to discuss at dinner. As a subscriber, you’ll get our daily newsletter with five recommended articles (on every imaginable topic), a daily podcast and a daily video. On Saturdays, you’ll receive our Best of the Week and on Sundays our very special Audio Browser dedicated to podcasts.The New Republic: The New Republic was founded in 1914 as a journal of opinion which seeks to meet the challenge of a new time. For over 100 years, we have championed progressive ideas and challenged popular opinion. Our vision for today revitalizes our founding mission for our new time. The New Republic promotes novel solutions for today’s most critical issues. We don’t lament intractable problems; our journalism debates complex issues and takes a stance. Our biggest stories are commitments for change. Today, The New Republic is the voice of creative thinkers, united by a collective desire to challenge the status quo.Electric Literature: Electric Literature is a nonprofit digital publisher dedicated to making literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Committed to publishing work that is intelligent and unpretentious, to elevating new voices, and to examining how literature and storytelling can help illuminate social justice issues.Brain Pickings: rain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning.Farnam Street — A Collection of Signal in a World Full of Noise. : In a world full of noise, Farnam Street is a place where you can step back and think about time-tested ideas while asking yourself questions that lead to meaningful understanding. We cover ideas from science and the humanities that will not only expand your intellectual horizons but also help you connect ideas, think in multidisciplinary ways, and explore meaning.Catapult: Catapult publishes award-winning fiction and nonfiction of the highest literary calibre, offers writing classes taught by acclaimed emerging and established writers, produces an award-winning daily online magazine of narrative nonfiction and fiction, and hosts an open online platform where writers can showcase their own writing, find resources, and get inspired.The Rumpus.net: The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know-how.Aeon | a world of ideas: Aeon has established itself as a unique digital magazine, publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. Aeon has three channels, and all are completely free to enjoy: Essays – Longform explorations of deep issues written by serious and creative thinkers. Ideas – Short provocations, maintaining Aeon’s high editorial standards but in a more nimble and immediate form. Our Ideas are published under a Creative Commons licence, making them available for republication. Video – A mixture of curated short documentaries and original Aeon productions.The Caravan: the Caravan is India’s first long-form narrative journalism magazine. It was relaunched in 2010 as a journal of politics and culture dedicated to meticulous reporting and the art of narrative. Since then, The Caravan has established itself as one of the country’s most respected and intellectually agile magazines and set new benchmarks for Indian journalism.The Swaddle: The Swaddle is a Mumbai-based independent media company deeply committed to the diversity of perspectives in media narratives. The Swaddle was founded as a digital women’s health resource, intended to address the dearth of reliable, non-judgmental women’s health information, and to strip so many women’s health issues — from mental health to gynecological health to sexual health — of their societal taboos through transparency and honesty.Literary Hub: Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life. There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost—with the help of its editorial partners, Lit Hub is a site readers can rely on for smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books. Each day—alongside original content and exclusive excerpts—Literary Hub is proud to showcase an editorial feature from one of its many partners from across the literary spectrum: publishers big and small, journals, bookstores, and non-profits.The Millions - Books, Arts, and Culture: an online magazine offering coverage on books, arts, and culture since 2003. The Millions has been featured on NPR and noted by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice, among others.Highbrow | Learn Something New Every Day. Join for Free! Highbrow is the solution to the knowledge gap. With Highbrow, we try to create a simple and easy way for people to gain new knowledge in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. In just 5 minutes, we hope to make you just a little more knowledgeable than you were the day before.Longreads : The best longform stories on the web Longreads, founded in 2009, is dedicated to helping people find and share the best storytelling in the world. We feature in-depth investigative reporting, interviews and profiles, podcasts, essays and criticism.Bitch Media | Bitch Media's Mission is to provide and encourage an engaged, thoughtful feminist response to media and popular culture. | Bitch Media, on the air with our podcasts, Popaganda and Backtalk, and on campuses around the world via Bitch on Campus.

Thanks for the A2A. On 5th September, a week after launching our app YourQuote (something like Instagram for Writers) on Google Play, we packed our bags, books, and guitars, and drove 500 kilometers from Delhi to Solang Valley, six kilometers farther off from Manali. We found ourselves a stranded guest-house with high-speed wi-fi and a well-furnished kitchen with a cook at an inexpensive price, that’s all that mattered. One day later, we began our work in our balcony office that faces the Himalayas.People back in Delhi thought we had gone mad, that the internet speed would be dismal in the hills and electricity would be sporadic. Sadly for them, none of their skepticism came true. I had been to this place three years ago while traveling across India and everything is just fine as it was back then. We don’t plan to return anytime soon, not until it starts to snow here, which is December.When asked why we chose to move, we had countless answers. No, it wasn’t for seeking inspiration (we are already quite inspired), not even for the premium maal that Manali is famous for (sadly, we aren’t too fond of it) nor it was to hire talents (we are self-sufficient as a team of two). Since we are building a viral tech-product that requires no operations, we were location independent. The primary reason became the saving cost, thus moving to a small town became a natural need — what could have been a better alternative than an underpopulated Himalayan village? But more than any of these reasons, the impetus for moving was the pure disillusionment with the startup folks in Delhi.Delhi’s startup janta is fond of what’s called gyaanbaazi. There are very few product folks in Delhi, most being sales/business development driven. YourQuote is our fourth product in the past one year and being the novice entrepreneurs that we were, we met a lot of folks in the industry for the past one year. Angel investors, VCs, fellow entrepreneurs, wannapreneurs and self-proclaimed startup mentors who haven’t had the balls to start anything of their own.Sadly, barring a couple of insightful folks running their own product companies, everyone’s advice sounded like the quintessential startup gyaan with little substance. “Do this, you will get funding,” “go out and network with other entrepreneurs, you will get this”, “this person will help you get connected to that person, meet him/her”, and the redundant “I think it has a lot of potential but add a hyperlocal/video element to this”.I remember Ashish and I driving all the way to Chandigarh, burning 5000 rupees in a day, to meet the founder of a renowned company. The meeting went well, or so I thought, and in the end, this fellow entrepreneur made it clear that he wasn’t willing to invest but he would be happy to connect me to some stalwarts in the Indian startup scene—Anupam Mittal, Kunal Shah and their ilks.He splattered out their names himself. He asked us to revamp our deck and mail it to him — so that he could connect. We did as asked, kept following up with him for 2 months, but to no effect. Nothing came out of it except our disappointment and the feeling of being fooled. I detest startup folks who don’t value the time of their fellow entrepreneurs. Why can’t they be blunt and straightforward? A simple no is far better than a hazy yes.Product requires vision and a key insight into the industry that comes from working in the industry for years. The gyaanbaazi that Delhi folks offer centres around the business model than the product, around marketing rather than growth. So many people wasted so much of our time that I am now averse to the industry — most of all, these dumbfuck analysts who call themselves VCs and pick brains with their second-hand startup knowledge, never having built anything of their own.The first question I ask any prospective employee is the same as that I ask a prospective investor: “Have you used the product?” Until you use my frigging product, all your ideas are vacuous and you are basically planning to invest your time and energy and even money on an idea that you want to build—not what we are building.Building a social product in India is challenging, and our abandonment of the previous three products is a testimony to that, because there is a dearth of early adopters in India. When our previous product failed to pick a viral trajectory on its own after some time, I resorted to an idea that I had already tested and attained product-market fit during my college days.A mobile-first microblogging platform for claiming copyright on one’s quotes, so that a simple Google search could lead one to those quotes. As a writer, it was a problem I deeply related to. There was no existing way to stop the rampant plagiarism going on in the social media. Attribution of credit to your short creativity was amiss. Therefore, for YourQuote, instead of going the usual text-only way, we devised a pictorial way of doing it—so that the pictures are shareable, visually stunning and non-copyable.Mobile-first approach implied doing away with the entire trouble of setting up a blog and so on. Inspired from Instagram, we created an app where the user logs in and starts posting their quotes on beautiful wallpapers right away, with no resistance. Hence, a writer garners his/her own follower base with their wit and creativity besides plagiarism becomes difficult as you cannot highlight the text on a jpeg and cropping the user’s name away will make the wallpaper look bad.In the initial two months in the Himalayas, we did many things right that paved the way to our current growth. Here’s a list of them:1. Distraction-free environment: Our guest house was a good 12km away from the nearest town, Manali, the hub of hippies and hash, which meant it was quite a task to even contemplate the visit. The off-season prevented too many tourists from visiting Solang and the areas around the guesthouse, which made it peaceful out there. The major concern was network but 3G — whether that of Airtel, Vodafone, or BSNL — worked just fine.Harsh Snehanshu on the left, Ashish Singh on the rightWe devised a beautiful schedule for ourselves in our small village. The day began with tea and a short hike to a nearby hill, followed by an hour of reading. The day was spent working out of our balcony office, Ashish adding features on the app, while I did the requisite community building, reaching out and onboarding writers over social media. In the evening, we would play our guitars or go discover long trails of nearby villages. Saving up on the costly partying with friends and family, we invested that money in hearing some live bands in Old Manali or the good old writing on the app. Sometimes, the guesthouse owner would captivate us over drinks and chicken with the fascinating legends of the mountains and the sadhus who lived before the area became commercial. It inspired the writers within, and our prolific outcome on our writing app was but natural.2. Cost-cutting: When based in Delhi, Ashish lives in Ghaziabad and I live in Malviya Nagar (almost two hours away). Being bootstrapped, we don’t want to waste money on office space so usually I convert my 2BHK into a makeshift office whenever he arrives. The travel wastes four hours besides the usual Rs 200 wasted on petrol. It’s always been a pain to collaborate and work together and Delhi’s brokerage as well as landlord hassle is quite cumbersome and time-consuming. Solang Valley Guesthouse was a find for us! For merely Rs 15,000 a month, we got a fully-furnished room with two single beds with free brunch and dinner. Can you believe it? All because of off-season. Delhi couldn’t have offered such a deal, no matter where we’d have wandered. It allowed us to even consider inviting interns and booking another room for them — and this is precisely what we did!3. We read a lot: How many of us startup founders read? Reading is a lost art in the startup world and most of us have been out of touch with books since our college days. However, our solitude-filled stay in the Himalayas made the two of us finish seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. While Ashish’s favourite was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which he still is rereading, I reveled in reading Naipaul’s The Writer’s People and to do justice to the Himalayas, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. We were reading like we used to and it brought us so much contentment.4. Learnt leanness like never before: The Himalayas taught us how to be lean, quite literally. We had just two laptops and one 3G hotspot as our office equipment. The dining table of the guesthouse was our makeshift workstation. Since it was only the two of us, we learnt how to do everything ourselves. I picked up Photoshop and UI design in addition to my growth-related tasks, while Ashish picked up DevOps in addition to his backend and Android dexterity. Both of us managed two months with less than Rs 50,000 of expenditure and this has been a great teacher about how less is more, a philosophy that has changed the way we look at life as well as the business.5. Focused on the customers instead of investors: One key reason why we took this audacious step of moving to the Himalayas was our anti-funding thesis until product-market-fit. We didn’t reach out to any investors nor did we respond to any of the LinkedInrequests for Skype calls from analysts of VC firms during these months. It was because of our unproductive experience during our previous venture, Whereabout. During Whereabout, being in Delhi, we wasted over 1,000 hours in meetings with these janta with no promising outcome. When you don’t talk to investors, your focus is not just on numbers but experience. We created an active feedback loop and acted on users’ feedback as quickly as we could. This helped us in making our users trust us as founders and create the product that they wanted — not what we hypothesised.6. We invited the sharpest people to intern with us: We floated a rare internship programme for a writer to lead our growth and a front-end developer to build our website. We found two extremely accomplished people, Abhas Tandon and Apekshita Varshney, busy in their own vocations but eager to escape to the mountains for 15 days. Abhas, who was previously one of the lead front-end engineers at PayPal, built our super-sleek search engine-optimised website from scratch in just two weeks. Apekshita, a journalist by training, streamlined our content strategies and helped us get some visibility. Being a former journalist based in Mumbai, she was well connected and helped catch the attention of Mid-day for our very first print feature.Being bootstrapped, we could never have afforded talents like them if it were in Delhi. Neither would have they come for Delhi, of late the smoggy metropolis. For this internship, we just paid for their stay, food, and travel. They came for the Himalayas and became more like family members over the 15 days they stayed with us. If you are a developer, do read Abhas’ experience documented in this blog post.7. We got free PR: I avidly blogged about our unique experiences and it caught the interest of a lot of my journalist connections on LinkedIn. It got us good coverage as editors and journalists started approaching us on their own. Entrepreneur covered our journey, as did Aaj Tak, Businessworld, Mid-day, DNA, and Firstpost. Besides, it also fascinated a lot of writers who read about our experiences and decided to give our app a try.8. We trekked: For the previous three products of ours, being in Delhi, we had very limited physical activity, being stuck to our laptops 24x7. Delhi’s pollution and our bootstrapped budget made it difficult for us to either consider running or going to the gym. Besides, it was our own dispirited selves, unable to find either an idea or an atmosphere that could keep us going. Our Himalayan experience changed all of that. Besides climbing every other small mountain near Solang, we climbed the Pitalsu peak (~5km) with the FITSO team who visited Manali. It was quite an experience, especially because trekking is all about persisting and not giving up.9. We wrote like never before: And we have been writing like never before! The Himalayas were the perfect setting for building a writing platform. The beauty inspired us, the warmth of the people egged us on to tell their stories, and the experiences are worth turning into a book. It transformed each one of us into storytellers.The Himalayas being too cold forced us to flee, and now that we see early signs of product-market fit, we have reached out to a select few investors who understand this space. I would strongly recommend product startups to consider being digital vagabonds for a while and seeing for themselves how to cut costs and achieve more.