School of Life

"The word 'melancholy' puts its finger on a particular species of sadness, which isn't an illness or even a problem: it's part of being human."

 We stumbled upon this lovely video that shows melancholy it its true light. 

Over-parenting Annonymus

A 26-step program for good parents gone bad by Wendy Mogel

I’ve written these steps to provide encouragement to well-intentioned, devoted, loving, intelligent parents who feel powerless to stop themselves from overindulging, overprotecting, and over-scheduling their children. Parents who get jittery if their offspring aren’t performing at a high level in every area. And parents who have unwittingly allowed traits like self-reliance, resilience, accountability and a spirit of adventure to slip to the bottom of their parenting priority list.

1. Don’t confuse a snapshot taken today with the epic movie of your child’s life. Kids go through phases. Glorious ones and alarming ones.

2. Don’t fret over or try to fix what’s not broken. Accept your child’s nature even if he’s shy, stubborn, moody, or not great at math.

3. Look at anything up close and you’ll see the flaws. Consider it perfectly normal if you like your child’s friends better than you like your child.

4. Work up the courage to say a simple “no.” Don’t try to reach consensus every time.

5. Encourage your child to play or spend time outside using all five senses in the three-dimensional world. How come only troubled rich kids get to go to the wilderness these days? Send your kids to camp for the longest stretch of time you can afford. Enjoy nature together as a family.

6. Don’t mistake children’s wants with their needs. Don’t fall for a smooth talker’s line about the urgent need for a cell phone “in case of an emergency, Mom!” or a new car “because it’s so much safer than your old van.” Privileges are not entitlements.

7. Remember that kids are hardy perennials, not hothouse flowers. Let them be cold, wet, or hungry for more than a second and they’ll appreciate the chance to be warm, dry, and fed.

8. Abstain from taking the role of Sherpa, butler, crabby concierge, secret police, short order cook, or lady’s maid. Your children are hard-wired for competence. Let them do things for themselves.

9. Before you nag, remind, criticize, advise, chime in, preach, or over-explain say to yourself: “W.A.I.T.” or “Why am I talking?” Listen four times more than you talk.

10. Remember that disappointments are necessary preparation for adult life. When your child doesn’t get invited to a friend’s birthday party, make the team, or get a big part in the play, stay calm. Without these experiences she’ll be ill-equipped for the real world.

11. Be alert but not automatically alarmed. Question yourself. Stop and reflect: Is this situation unsafe or just uncomfortable for my child? Is it an emergency or a new challenge?

12. Learn to love the words “trial” and “error.” Let your child make mistakes before going off to college. Grant freedom based on demonstrated responsibility and accountability, not what all the other kids are doing.

13. Don’t be surprised or discouraged when your big kid has a babyish tantrum or meltdown. Don’t confuse sophistication with maturity. Setbacks naturally set them back. They set us back too, but we can have a margarita.

14. Allow your child to do things that scare you. Don’t mistake vulnerability for fragility. If you want her to grow increasingly independent and self-confident, let her get her learner’s permit when she comes of age; don’t offer a nuanced critique of her best friend or crush.

15. Don’t take it personally if your teenager treats you like crap. Judge his character not on the consistency of in-house politeness, clarity of speech, or degree of eye contact but on what teachers say, whether he’s welcomed by his friends’ parents, and his manners towards his grandparents, the neighbours, salespeople, and servers in restaurants.

16. Don’t automatically allow your child to quit. When he lobbies passionately against continuing an activity or program that “isn’t how I thought it would be!” it’s tempting to exhaust yourself selling him on the benefits. Instead remind yourself that first impressions are not always enduring; that a commitment to a team or group is honourable; and that your investment (of time and/or money) is not to be taken for granted. But do take his reasoned preferences into account when making future plans.

17. Refrain from trying to be popular with your children just because your parents weren’t as attuned to your emotional needs as you might have wished. Watch out for the common parental pattern of nice, nice, nice…furious!

18. Avoid the humblebrag parent lest you begin to believe that your child is already losing the race. Remind yourself that kids’ grades, popularity, or varsity ranking are not a measure of your worth as a parent (nor theirs as people). Recognise that those other parents are lying.

19. Wait at least 24 hours before shooting off an indignant email to a teacher, coach, or the parent of a mean classmate. Don’t be a “drunk texter.”  Sleep on it.

20. Consider the long-term consequences of finding work-arounds for the “no-candy-in-camp-care-packages” rule. If you demonstrate that rules are made to be broken and shortcuts can always be found, you have given your child license to plagiarise and cheat on tests.

21. Maintain perspective about school and college choices.  Parents caught up in the admissions arms race forget that the qualities of the student rather than the perceived status of the school are the best predictor of a good outcome.

22. Treat teachers like the experts and allies they are. Give your child the chance to learn respect. It’s as important a lesson as Algebra 2. Remember how life-changing a good relationship with a teacher can be.

23. Praise the process and not the product. Appreciating your child’s persistence and hard work reinforces the skills and habits that lead to success far more than applauding everyday achievements or grades.

24. If you want your child to be prepared to manage his future college workload and responsibilities, take care before you hire a tutor, a private coach, or college application consultant. There’s no room for all of them in a dorm room.

25. Rather than lurking, snooping, sniping or giving up, practice sensible stewardship of your child’s online activities. Evaluate her level of self-respect and good judgment in other areas.

26. Treat ordinary household chores and paid jobs as more important learning opportunities than jazzy extracurriculars. With real-world experience, your child will develop into an employable (and employed) adult. That said, accept that older children will get chores done on AST (Adolescent Standard Time).

Poetry

Spring in the City by Krithi grade 8

The wind played my ears like a flute
Bleached clouds sailed across the sky like a parachute
The first daffodils of spring are like a brand new dress suit
The smell of which brings butterflies in pursuit.

Flowers in the city are like lipstick on a woman
Many of which are fresh and bright landscaping the garden
The hills and valleys foreshorten
View of which is enthralling like a pretty maiden.

Cakes for Halloween by Anoushka grade 7 

Apron, pink gloves and hat,
stuff to wear before baking,
some stirring device and spoon to pat,
are some things that are used for the dish
we are making.

Time to put flour in a bowl,
along with milk, butter, eggs, and sugar,
the milk will help the dough roll
and the dish will be super.

Set the mixture in the mould,
shaped like boggarts and witches,
the yummy cakes shall be sold
and one will end up in riches.

Finally the treats are done,
time to eat them! Have some fun!
Our halloween time has begun,
ghosts are coming! Let's run!

Such an intimidating field - an attempt to bring it close to kids

A Children’s Picture-book Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
August 20, 2015 By Brian Skinner

First of all, don’t panic.

I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of ideas in graduate-level theoretical physics.  But I’ll try to make this introduction in the gentlest and most palatable way I can think of: with simple-minded pictures and essentially no math.

To set the stage for this first lesson in quantum field theory, let’s imagine, for a moment, that you are a five-year-old child.  You, the child, are talking to an adult, who is giving you one of your first lessons in science.  Science, says the adult, is mostly a process of figuring out what things are made of.  Everything in the world is made from smaller pieces, and it can be exciting to find out what those pieces are and how they work.  A car, for example, is made from metal pieces that fit together in specially-designed ways.  A mountain is made from layers of rocks that were pushed up from inside the earth.  The earth itself is made from layers of rock and liquid metal surrounded by water and air.

This is an intoxicating idea: everything is made from something.

So you, the five-year-old, start asking audacious and annoying questions. For example:

What are people made of?
People are made of muscles, bones, and organs.
Then what are the organs made of?
Organs are made of cells.
What are cells made of?
Cells are made of organelles.
What are organelles made of?
Organelles are made of proteins.
What are proteins made of?
Proteins are made of amino acids.
What are amino acids made of?
Amino acids are made of atoms.
What are atoms made of?
Atoms are made of protons, neutron, and electrons.
What are electrons made of?
Electrons are made from the electron field.
What is the electron field made of?
…

And, sadly, here the game must come to an end, eight levels down.  This is the hard limit of our scientific understanding.  To the best of our present ability to perceive and to reason, the universe is made from fields and nothing else, and these fields are not made from any smaller components.

But it’s not quite right to say that fields are the most fundamental thing that we know of in nature.  Because we know something that is in some sense even more basic: we know the rules that these fields have to obey.  Our understanding of how to codify these rules came from a series of truly great triumphs in modern physics.  And the greatest of these triumphs, as I see it, was quantum mechanics.

In this post I want to try and paint a picture of what it means to have a field that respects the laws of quantum mechanics.  In a previous post, I introduced the idea of fields (and, in particular, the all-important electric field) by making an analogy with ripples on a pond or water spraying out from a hose.  These images go surprisingly far in allowing one to understand how fields work, but they are ultimately limited in their correctness because the implied rules that govern them are completely classical.  In order to really understand how nature works at its most basic level, one has to think about a field with quantum rules.

***

The first step in creating a picture of a field is deciding how to imagine what the field is made of. Keep in mind, of course, that the following picture is mostly just an artistic device.  The real fundamental fields of nature aren’t really made of physical things (as far as we can tell); physical things are made of them.  But, as is common in science, the analogy is surprisingly instructive.

So let’s imagine, to start with, a ball at the end of a spring.  Like so:

This is the object from which our quantum field will be constructed.  Specifically, the field will be composed of an infinite, space-filling array of these ball-and-springs.

To keep things simple, let’s suppose that, for some reason, all the springs are constrained to bob only up and down, without twisting or bending side-to-side.  In this case the array of springs can be called, using the jargon of physics, a scalar field.  The word “scalar” just means a single number, as opposed to a set or an array of multiple numbers.  So a scalar field is a field whose value at a particular point in space and time is characterised only by a single number.  In this case, that number is the height of the ball at the point in question.  (You may notice that what I described in the previous post was a vector field, since the field at any given point was characterised by a velocity, which has both a magnitude and a direction.)

In the picture above, the array of balls-and-springs is pretty uninteresting: each ball is either stationary or bobs up and down independently of all others.  In order to make this array into a bona fide field, one needs to introduce some kind of coupling between the balls.  So, let’s imagine adding little elastic bands between them:

Now we have something that we can legitimately call a field.  (My quantum field theory book calls it a “mattress”.)  If you disturb this field – say, by tapping on it at a particular location – then it will set off a wave of ball-and-spring oscillations that propagates across the field.  These waves are, in fact, the particles of field theory.  In other words, when we say that there is a particle in the field, we mean that there is a wave of oscillations propagating across it.

These particles (the oscillations of the field) have a number of properties that are probably familiar from the days when you just thought of particles as little points whizzing through empty space.  For example, they have a well-defined propagation velocity, which is related to the weight of each of the balls and the tightness of the springs and elastic bands.  This characteristic velocity is our analog of the “speed of light”.  (More generally, the properties of the springs and masses define the relationship between the particle’s kinetic energy and its propagation velocity, like the KE=12mv2 of your high school physics class.)  The properties of the springs also define the way in which particles interact with each other.  If two particle-waves run into each other, they can scatter off each other in the same way that normal particles do.

(A technical note: the degree to which the particles in our field scatter upon colliding depends on how “ideal” the springs are.  If the springs are perfectly described by Hooke’s law, which says that the restoring force acting on a given ball is linearly proportional to the spring’s displacement from equilibrium, then there will be no interaction whatsoever.  For a field made of such perfectly Hookean springs, two particle-waves that run into each other will just go right through each other.  But if there is any deviation from Hooke’s law, such that the springs get stiffer as they are stretched or compressed, then the particles will scatter off each other when they encounter one another.)

Finally, the particles of our field clearly exhibit “wave-particle duality” in a way that is easy to see without any philosophical hand-wringing.  That is, our particles by definition are waves, and they can do things like interfere destructively with each other or diffract through a double slit.

All of this is very encouraging, but at this point our fictitious field lacks one very important feature of the real universe: the discreteness of matter.  In the real world, all matter comes in discrete units: single electrons, single photons, single quarks, etc.  But you may notice that for the spring field drawn above, one can make an excitation with completely arbitrary magnitude, by tapping on the field as gently or as violently as one wants.  As a consequence, our (classical) field has no concept of a minimal piece of matter, or a smallest particle, and as such it cannot be a very good analogy to the actual fields of nature.

***

To fix this problem, we need to consider that the individual constituents of the field – the balls mounted on springs – are themselves subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

A full accounting of the laws of quantum mechanics can take some time, but for the present pictorial discussion, all you really need to know is that a quantum ball on a spring has two rules that it must follow.  1) It can never stop moving, but instead must be in a constant state of bobbing up and down.  2) The amplitude of the bobbing motion can only take certain discrete values.

oscillator_quantaThis quantisation of the ball’s oscillation has two important consequences.  The first consequence is that, if you want to put energy into the field, you must put in at least one quantum.  That is, you must give the field enough energy to kick at least one ball-and-spring into a higher oscillation state.  Arbitrarily light disturbances of the field are no longer allowed. Unlike in the classical case, an extremely light tap on the field will produce literally zero propagating waves.  The field will simply not accept energies below a certain threshold.  Once you tap the field hard enough, however, a particle is created, and this particle can propagate stably through the field.

This discrete unit of energy that the field can accept is what we call the rest mass energy of particles in a field.  It is the fundamental amount of energy that must be added to the field in order to create a particle.  This is, in fact, how to think about Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 in a field theory context.  When we say that a fundamental particle is heavy (large mass m), it means that a lot of energy has to be put into the field in order to create it.  A light particle, on the other hand, requires only a little bit of energy.

(By the way, this why physicists build huge particle accelerators whenever they want to study exotic heavy particles.  If you want to create something heavy like the Higgs boson, you have to hit the Higgs field with a sufficiently large (and sufficiently concentrated) burst of energy to give the field the necessary one quantum of energy.)

The other big implication of imposing quantum rules on the ball-and-spring motion is that it changes pretty dramatically the meaning of empty space.  Normally, empty space, or vacuum, is defined as the state where no particles are around.  For a classical field, that would be the state where all the ball-and-springs are stationary and the field is flat.  Something like this:

But in a quantum field, the ball-and-springs can never be stationary: they are always moving, even when no one has added enough energy to the field to create a particle.  This means that what we call vacuum is really a noisy and densely energetic surface:

This random motion (called vacuum fluctuations) has a number of fascinating and eminently noticeable influences on the particles that propagate through the vacuum.  To name a few, it gives rise to the Casimir effect (an attraction between parallel surfaces, caused by vacuum fluctuations pushing them together) and the Lamb shift (a shift in the energy of atomic orbits, caused by the electron getting buffeted by the vacuum).

In the jargon of field theory, physicists often say that “virtual particles” can briefly and spontaneously appear from the vacuum and then disappear again, even when no one has put enough energy into the field to create a real particle.  But what they really mean is that the vacuum itself has random and indelible fluctuations, and sometimes their influence can be felt by the way they kick around real particles.

That, in essence, is a quantum field: the stuff out of which everything is made.  It’s a boiling sea of random fluctuations, on top of which you can create quantised propagating waves that we call particles.

I only wish, as a primarily visual thinker, that the usual introduction to quantum field theory didn’t look quite so much like this.  Because behind the equations of QFT there really is a tremendous amount of imagination, and a great deal of wonder.

The original article appeared on: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/

Gearing up towards the Independence Day!

There is something in the air! The school seems like a busy hive. We are gearing towards the celebration of the Independence Day! This whole week we have had the morning assembly dedicated to the topic of the 'Freedom struggle' and students have been introduced to many aspects of it.

The Achiever's house was reminding us of the important dates on our path to freedom and have shared a wonderful poem by Subhandra Kumari Chauhan on Jhansi Ki Rani, while the Believer's house showed us a powerful video showing the ups and downs of the freedom struggle, pointing out what freedom actually means and how can we use freedom to our own advantage.  Creators prepared a skit on Dandi march in a way that students could relate to and we believe they liked it as there was a pin drop silence while the skit was on. Explorers, who are actually on tomorrow have been practising their skit to perfection. We cant wait to see it tomorrow!

This time the Independence celebration's tasks and duties have been divided among the houses and each house is preparing their part. Believers are responsible for the script and narrations, Achievers will present us with an upbeat dance performance and Creators will mesmerise us with a patriotic song and charm us with a fancy dress event done by the little creators. Explorers are the busiest ones towards the end as they are responsible for the decorations and we have witnessed an explosion of colours and creativity in the library room today where they set base to prepare the decorative items that will be put on display tomorrow.

Even in the classrooms we have witnessed a lot of creativity and love towards our motherland. Children have all expressed it in their own way and our display boards will be flooded with orange, white and green from tomorrow onwards. It's a time when we feel especially proud of our country and we like that feeling! Jai Hind!

The Most Important Question of Your Life by Mark Manson

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship — but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?

Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.

At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”

Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”

Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.

If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.

Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?

That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.

For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find time. Then… and then nothing.

Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.

I was in love with the result — the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing — but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.

The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.

Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser. Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.

But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.

Taken from the original article written by Mark Manson, author, thinker, and life enthusiast.

http://markmanson.net/question

Rubik's cube solved

If you have a kid with a wonderful talent, do let us know!

Today we are presenting our grade 3B student Vruthaya who is explaining how to solve a 3x3 Rubik's cube. Well done, Vruthaya! :)