Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Day 2 - What Do I Do?

We have about an hour before we're scheduled to meet with the science teachers during their free period to talk about the Question Bank questions for the next day, as well as to answer any questions the teachers themselves had. They seem happy enough about the labs I've prepared, since they are about relatively general topics and can be done at any time. What they really want, however, is labs from the syllabus.

They give us the English medium version of the state syllabus science books, and now I am totally stumped. Now I have no idea what they need me for. The books themselves contain experiments illustrating the principles within. They have suggested activities for the teacher to demonstrate that are quite similar to those I've seen in America (onion root tip, anyone?). The English science book is well written, and the Telugu probably even more so.

In the end, my understanding is that they want me to choose the most important experiments, the ones they could have the students do. Why is that a job I can do and they can't? That's still a little confusing. Well, I can start off by answering their questions and finding out how to preserve a specimen in formaldehyde or test for the presence of starch in a leaf (i.e., how to get rid of the chlorophyll and get the iodine past the cuticle). Unfortunately, the (lack of) speed and unreliability of the internet will make my usual methods of fact-checking difficult. JFGI? Yeah, that's not so easy.

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