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Making and selling food preserves. Soil analysis or moisture content of agricultural products as service. Text Books While the practical lessons did not raise any controversies, some of our textbook lessons did. They raised certain fundamental questions on the methods of teaching. It is therefore perhaps appropriate to raise them here. In our textbooks, (as also practicals) we start with measurement. In the lesson on measurement, we started with units and gave a table to illustrate the different things we measure and their units. The first item was weight, for which we gave kilogram and gram as the units. Some science teachers raised an objection, saying that weight is a force and the unit should be Newton and not gram or kilogram. I only remarked whether they would ask their grocer to sell them one Newton of Wheat! They were insistent that though we may use wrong terminology in everyday life, we should teach the correct concepts, particularly in a physics lesson. I would not want to create a schism between the classroom and everyday life. We certainly teach them the difference between weight and mass later, but we would not avoid the use of the word weight in the sense in which it is used in everyday life. They were not convinced even when we showed them a chemistry instruction book, asking for weighing out so many grams of a reagent! Another controversy was our statement that every measurement is an approximation; no measurement is absolute. Also that even socalled subjective properties such as taste and colour can be measured to different levels of accuracies, and that such measurement is necessary. Thus, we wished to convey to the < Rural Development Through Education System 48
