3 ms·

> figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one

> figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.

chrismorgan 5y ago
Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British). Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C. I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.

chrismorgan 5y ago

Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British). Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C. I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.