journal of science
education
Editorial
If we could measure the collective tension among the children and teenagers of our country, and recently among their parents as well, it would certainly peak in March every year, when the final examinations are held. There is almost universal agreement that education should be more enjoyable. As to how this can be done there is no consensus.
At least part of the problem lies in the mismatch that often exists between a student’s talent, what the system is geared to teach and test, and the profession he or she finally takes up. A student who is hardworking, organised, and capable of assimilating, retaining and reproducing information is rewarded. However, equally important attributes like creativity, skills in writing, speaking, design, and tinkering, to name a few, or just plain good nature, are not adequately tested. There has been certainly no mismatch in the case of Shiing-Shen Chern, the outstanding differential geometer and the featured scientist in the current issue of Resonance. He got to do what he was best at ; as he says “.. I am always doing mathematics, because the other things I cannot do.”
As usual, this issue contains articles covering a variety of topics. Two are related to Chern’s work. Natarajan and Sen show in a remarkably simple way that to understand the theory of Special Relativity it is important to recognise that ‘simultaneity is relative’. It may surprise many of us that the Sequoia tree in California is not the largest and oldest living organism but, as described by Maheshwari, it is a fungus spread over 890 hectares and which is about 2400 years old. At about 112m high, however, the Sequoia is still the tallest. The Classroom section has an article on an interesting mechanics experiment, and Nagendrappa continuing on his series on free radicals tells us how they affect our health.
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