Week # 10 – Life Hour

We went through quite a few things today.

• I asked the kids why don’t satellites fall down to earth? We used the common analogy of firing a cannon at various speeds and how it some speed it would just continue to fall in a curve but because of the curvature of the earth, it would never hit the ground.
• What is escape velocity?
• Where does matter come from?
• Why do we see various elements around us? Where do they come from?
• Briefly on how elements turn into other elements. Hydrogen turns into Helium and so on.
• What is a light year?
• The speed of light?
• What are black holes?
• How gravity bends light as well. I showed them what Einstein’s cross looked like.

These are advanced topics but we gave the kids a very very brief intro to get them curious. They responded really well and seemed genuinely surprised on how the universe works.

In the latter part of the hour, we touched on learning to have better conversations by staying away from judging and using emotions to digest actions/ information but stay focused on the actual information.

Kashif used a fantastic example and asked them what the kids think he was doing while he winked at them. They all said you are winking but he pointed out that, he was actually just closing and opening his one eye.

We want the kids to have better conversations by trying to isolate their emotions from the conversation and rather focusing on the facts on the ground. This is inspired by Non-Violent Communication.

The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti remarked that “the highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating.”

We also discussed briefly about media and history. We should understand that in most cases history books are written by the victors and how it is important to find the other side of the story as well.

The aim is to get the kids asking questions when they come across information. Being able to distinguish between fake news and reality is getting more important by the day.