A Peek into the Life of a Student Teacher

As scheduled, we had our theatre presentation on Monday(15th Nov 2021) and also the official welcoming ceremony for our juniors. All the 6 groups put up a splendid job in preparing a script, getting the costumes, props etc required for their performance. Honestly, I thought the limited time would just affect the quality of the performances but none of the skits looked like it was prepared just hours before the performance. The first group's topic was 'Chaayakada' and this was my favourite of all the performances. I think the audibility of the dialogues played a major role in my choice. Each and every person performed their roles very brilliantly. My group, Sapphire (3rd group) performed on the topic,' Hope'. We divided our performance into two parts to depict the different forms of hope. We had a small dance at the beginning that we rustled up at the last moment. The first part dealt with a situation that provided hope to a young girl with suicidal thoughts The seco

Why not delve into some serious maths?  The 'Birthday Paradox' is actually not a paradox (a statement which is true and false at the same time) but it is a statement that is too interesting that it seems false to our human minds.   What is the probability that two persons will have the same birthday? There is a 1 in 365 chance for this to happen or a probability of 1/365. Then I can say the probability of 2 people not having the same birthday is  Hence, there's a 99% chance of 2 people having different birthdays. But if instead of 2 there were 23 people, then what would be the probability of 2 people having the same birthday. For this, we must consider all the possible pairings between these people and it is equal to There are a total of 253 possible pairings between a group of 23 people. Since each pair has a probability of 364/365 of having different birthdays, the probability of finding a pair among 253 possible pairs who have different birthdays will be equal to  Then t

 Why was the concept of probability invented? This is the question we are going to answer through this post. Probability was discovered to answer a gambling problem. The original problem is a bit complicated but the simplified version goes like this.  Suppose two persons, A and B are playing a game of coin toss where the person who gets their toss thrice first wins a pot of gold. If the score is 2-1 and the game has to be stopped due to some unforeseeable reasons then how would the pot of gold be divided?  By logic, since A is leading with 2 points and B only has 1 point, the pot can be divided in the ratio of 2:1 . This seems like a good argument but this fails when the score is 0-1. In this case, it seems unfair to give the pot of gold to B based on the previous argument when A may have a chance to win in the upcoming tosses. But if one were to calculate the probability of winning the game of the two players, then it would give us a foolproof explanation as to how to divide the

 Ever wondered how the perimeter of irregular surfaces (like coastlines, borders of a fern leaf) are measured and compared?  For example, let us consider a coastline, you can see that as we zoom in on the picture more irregularities pop up, there is no stage of zooming in where we'll finally reach a straight line. So, if I had to measure the coastline using a 15 cm scale, it'd obviously ignore the small irregularities which lie beyond the scope of a 15 cm scale. If I measure the coastline using a 5 cm scale, then it would accommodate comparatively more irregularities, as a result, the length of the same coastline will be more in this case. This means as the precision of the scale increases the length of the coastline increases. Comparison of coastlines between different regions becomes difficult due to this dilemma. This is known as the 'Coastline Paradox' or 'Richardson effect' and originally the problem was framed as, "How Long is the Coast of Britain?&qu

 8th November 2021- 12 November 2021 Back to college after a week of model exams. This week was utilized to complete the remaining portions and to do the remaining activities. We the maths association was the only group left to do the presentation. Though we have been postponing it for a while, all 13 of us finally did it on 11th November. This week we had quick music and theatre workshops. In our music class, a few of us were randomly called on stage to either perform, the 'Saptha Swarangal' or any song of our choice. This was done to check our stage fright and spontaneity. All who were called did a fabulous job. Plus we did some vocal and breathing exercises which will help us in our future careers as busy teachers. In our theatre workshop, we did quite a few activities which helped us to get rid of our inhibitions that had built up during the online classes period. One of my favourite activities was where we walked around the room pretending to be a thing, person or animal w

 25th October 2021 - 29th October 2021 We had our criticism classes this week. A maximum of three classes were conducted in a day. I had my class on Thursday (27th October 2021) and it was recorded. It did not go as well as planned and my peers rightly pointed out the areas I need to improve. I got to critique the classes conducted on 28th and 29th. Some of the common mistakes made by us were in the areas of class control, use of blackboard and chart preparation. Due to the pandemic, we couldn't have real school students to attend our criticism classes but my classmates did do a great job of 'acting' like a bunch of unruly schoolchildren.  My favourite classes were taken by Neema and Aswathy (others were really good but theirs stood out). Neema did a great job with providing innovative activities to the students while Aswathy always had control over the class no matter what the situation was. In the upcoming week, we have our second-semester model exams.