Category: Uncategorized

The best way to understand Agriculture is to actually get into it. I suggest school children to start doing it at school and repeat it at home. The produce can be sold or distributed at carnivals or amongst family and friends. This has the additional benefit of teaching and experiencing Accounting and Marketing . I am a strong advocate for Carnivals at schools as both educational and providing experience in a cooperative milieu. Getting involved in a Caenival is an educative experience and often teaches children initiative, leadership, accounting and marketing. Amongst many other things. Though these maybe at a basic level, they are enough to set a spark and lead the child to think at a long term and possible future career. It also helps the child bring out hidden talents.  A point about learning about Agriculture is to empathize with farmers and better understand empathy too.

This is a follow up with the school subjects blog post..

I wish agriculture is taught early as a school subject along with the basics of growing fruits and flowers which can be sold at carnivals. This can teach children many things and make them aware of the challenges of agriculture. This is not only a learning experience but also teaches them respect for agriculture and its practitioners. This will also teach children about water management and natural resources. I feel strongly that children should have a better understanding about agriculture and this helps form more empathy for the farmer and the challenges faced by them . Perhaps children can practice farming even at home and grow flowers, vegetables and fruits for a better experience and learning. limited space and resources can help the learning process by increasing the challenges and better learn the challenges faced by farmers. Selling the produce at home an or at carnivals helps learn about accounting and marketing too.

A big challenge when hiring people is that of choosing someone for skilled jobs like programming or marketing. Both of these cannot be done on academic performance or simply asking questions that test memory and knowledge. My favorite approach is to test programmers by giving them a small task to be done on the computer. This not only tests their speed but also attitude apart from programming skill. While interviewing , As an Oracle database developer, I myself have faced interviews where the interviewer assigns tasks that are often offline and places trust on doing it and explaining the solution ranging to interviews that are largely about memory and involve questions that are straight out of the Oracle manual like what is the syntax for xyzzy command.