Trouble with Umer: A mentor-psychiatrist's analysis

His voice was full of certainty, affection, love and care. He was giving as if warnings to me of the deep, subtle problems (as we'd see), and proposed cure. He communicates the idea keeping his audience in his full grip. He knows you more than you do, yet with very limited knowledge. After all, he's a highly-qualified psychiatrist with a scholarly bent of mind. He said to me, commenting on my mental state in the context of my learning behavior:

• Your priorities need overhaul and re-fixing, especially in what you study
• Avoid intellectual distractions: You do multiple things at time ... get involved in varying disciplines, and this can make you utterly confused, as I have observed it, sometimes.
• Look, brain is just like a child ... Like a child it slowly develops, it grows as a human being, it eats somethings and then it disgusts, finally reproducing (using that energy). Your problem is indigestion.
• You have more than sufficient knowledge, but it's not systematized.
• Complex things are built on simple, concrete ideas. Make your foundations strong by immersing in the thing in hand.

Meeting Minutes: School-think

Today, I had another successful meeting with a young and yet very energetic, motivated and dynamic medical student, who was schooled back in Saudi Arabia, on school I am building these days. He showed great enthusiasm in this project, the aim of which is to provide an Islamic educational model as an alternative to some of the best educational institutions / models / systems /experience in the whole world. He has even agreed to prepare a manual for Biology department to revolutionize or at least overhaul the way teaching is done and the way books are written. He wants to see our school as the best Islamic school for the community of my city.

The best part was the way schooling is done in Saudi A. It's fascinating to know how conceptual, activity-based and highly-biased-towards-developing-thinking-skills it is. So we benchmarking it: We need the books taught there and the it's taught, and all co-curricular activities are done. (Need to make database of all benchmarks.)

Here, I'd like to discuss some random points that he shared informally with me:

• The Think-Tank teachers are given permanent job.
• The books we write on INDUCTION based, i.e., make students interpret and derive results from the data, rather than making knowledge narrow through the use of deduction.
• Moral Training in Morning (MTM): Back in his school, every morning students would prepare speeches/skits/any other way of presenting lessons based on Quran + Hadith + Discussion(-based); powered by a student affairs, or something, committee (consisting of a few teachers + students) who prepare the program. SO instead of having teachers give boring sermons on stage, students enact situations to teach moral lessons from Islam and hadith that is very interesting for pupils*.
• Encouraging salah/prayers: We can encourage pupils to pray, apart from making Zuhar prayer compulsory for 10/10+ pupils, by asking teachers to motivate students to prayer two rakah prayer during mid-day break in school-mosque.
• NO WRITTEN HOMEWORK that makes children dull. Rather we make students do work (activity based) in the classroom. And all homework we give is like task-work or like puzzles, for which there are no ZERO marks; every answer is appreciated, but the right answer is more appreciated.
• Islamic studies taught in Saudi A. is not a single subject but many subjects: During 3 years (at some level) they teach us whole Quran 10 surahs/year for which there's a proper exam; Tafseer of 3 paras of Quran; Memorization of 100 hadith/fiqh points.