Anish Nadh’s Blog

I think so! Movies are definitely better than books. Though both are different movies give in a lot of visual suggestions and easy to understand. Books, on the other hand runs your imagination and you create the version of what the author intended. A book must also over-explain a character, where as a movie just lays out the facts. I’ve also begun to enjoy listening to podcasts and watching documentaries over reading books just because it’s hands free I’m able to clean or cook at the same time. Books will have to go and we will embrace new technologies. After all, we started with drawing pictures on walls inside caves, we’ve come a long way. Miles and miles we must go… 

The purpose of education is to enable an individual to explore expert opinions and findings, and find it’s applications in their day to day life.  Our ancestors discovered numbers. We learnt from what the ancestors taught, added some more and passed the knowledge to our successors. We also rely heavily on technological advancements like calculators to make complex calculations (think compound interest), bearable to help our existence.The very act of solving mathematics and puzzles make connections in our brain and affects our overall intelligence.  The above analogy holds good  for any subject, languages, music, art and more. As a teacher one must constantly remind themselves this purpose just so that their intentions are clear. This will help the student chase knowledge and not just certificates. 

This is a concept coined by Brian Tracy. This helped me beat procrastination. Eating that frog gets you too act on that Herculean task, that you have been postponing. You should do the mist uninteresting but important tasks first, when your energy is at the maximum. 

I have been playing Hanon on piano with my niece, Natalia,  for the past few weeks. It’s a bunch of piano exercises set to build the fingers. Natalia enjoys these exercises and we completed the 1st exercise playing each hand separately. Now we must put them together and the challenge is to play this with the correct co-ordination.  The idea is to make this Malayalam proverb work, that I heard my grandparents occasionally. Nithya abyasi Anaye edukkum. (One who regularly practices, can lift an elephant). The goal here is not to lift the elephant, but to just practise regularly. 

This quote from George Bernard Shaw, was made available to me by a musician, I fail to recollect who that was. But this quote holds good for some of the computer science lecturers we have had. Let’s put this to perspective. If you are a trained computer programmer, you will go for the lucrative corporate job! But the worst are these corporate rejects! They end up as lecturers to the perils of the poor students. But eventually the bad programming teacher learns, teaching; thanks to years of syllabus revisions and they end up leaving colleges to find lucrative corporate jobs. The college quietly moves on to the next mediocre educator. 

It’s 8:00 am now and I started teaching music at 6:00 am today. The classes were for Ivan, Abel and Hannah. They were well prepared for their lesson and also had the desire and drive to learn music. Their nimble hands can play anything! It’s so good to watch your students grow into amazing musicians.  Some of my students are winning competitions in their schools and writing their own music. So, something I’m doing must be right, passing and growing the talents I was bestowed through the years.  I remember all my teachers here who were physically present and made a huge impact on me. Issac, Santhosh, Dev, Kaundinya, Jayanth, Sahana, Along, Satem, Ebenezer,  Kenneth, Zimmerman, David, Bruce, Guthrie, Bryden, Judah, Grace, Leslie, Tony, Floyd, Konarak & Siddharth. The wealth of knowledge from my teachers and their blessings is all I have. Teaching is my calling & purpose.  My inability to play a certain passage or read sheet music as well as my students is sometimes frustrating bu

I have been on a schedule and keeping my tasks on track. I now have a small daily routine, that includes this blog. There’s more I want to do, especially helping my students and growing my music school. I’m also refining my chores to accommodate more specific scheduling using google calendar. This gets work done, so be it!