Mother of the Bulbul Returns

 

Learn Anything In Four Steps - The Feynman Technique

1. Pick a topic you want to understand and start studying it. Write down everything you know about the topic on a notebook page, and add to that page every time you learn something new about it.

2. Pretend to teach your topic to a classroom. Make sure you're able to explain the topic in simple terms.

3. Go back to the books when you get stuck. The gaps in your knowledge should be obvious. Revisit problem areas until you can explain the topic fully.

4. Simplify and use analogies. Repeat the process while simplifying your language and connecting facts with analogies to help strengthen your understanding.

Spin and the art of attack

Being an aggressive spinner is not about bowling flat and fast. Quite the opposite, and you only have to look at veteran bowlers operate in Twenty20 to see that

Aakash Chopra

April 14, 2011

Grounds are getting smaller, wickets flatter, bats thicker. And just to make it tougher for bowlers, the format of the game has got shorter. As if the rule book doesn't already favour batsmen, these "innovations" have stacked the odds against bowlers higher still. But while it has ostensibly become tougher for bowlers to succeed, good ones will always have their say.

Who are these "good bowlers", though? In the pre-Twenty20 era these were men who could simply bowl quick, for a batsman needed special skills to get on top of someone bowling at 145kph. It was widely believed that the shorter the format, the smaller the role of a spinner. In fact, the only way for a spinner to survive in Twenty20 was to bowl quick and flat, or so it was believed for the longest time.

But a look at the spinners in action in the current IPL is enough to tell you an entirely different story. Spinners who're bowling slower in the air are ruling the roost.

Is it only about bowling slow or it there more to it? Let's take a look at what's making these bowlers ever so successful.

A big heart
While fast bowlers are the stingy kind, who hate runs being scored off them, spinners are more often than not advised to be generous and to always be prepared to get hit. Bishan Bedi would tell his wards that a straight six is always hit off a good ball and one should never feel bad about it. Having a big heart doesn't mean that you should stop caring about getting hit; rather that you shouldn't chicken out and start bowling flatter.

Suraj Randiv could easily have bowled flatter when he was hit for two consecutive sixes by Manoj Tiwary in the first match, but he showed the heart to flight another delivery, and got the better of his opponent. You rarely see Daniel Vettori or Shane Warne take a step back whenever they come under the hammer. Instead of thinking of ways to restrict damage, they try to plot a dismissal.

Slow down the pace
Most young spinners don't realise that the quicker one bowls, the easier it gets for the batsman, who doesn't have to move his feet to get to the pitch of the ball and smother the spin. You can do fairly well while staying inside the crease, and small errors of judgement aren't fatal either, as long as you're playing straight.

The slower the delivery, the tougher it is to generate power to clear the fence, but there are no such issues if the bowler is sending down darts. In fact, even rotating the strike is a lot easier if the bowler is bowling quicker, for you need great hands to manoeuvre the slower delivery.

Yes, it is perhaps easier to find the blockhole if you're bowling quick, but you're not really going to get under the bat and bowl the batsman, since you don't have that sort of pace.

Also, if you bowl quick, the chances of getting turn off the surface (unless it is really abrasive) are minimal. You must flight the ball and bowl slow to allow the ball to grip the pitch and get purchase.

Attack the batsman
Mushtaq Ahmed tells young spinners that they need to have the attitude of fast bowlers to attack batsmen.

Attacking the batsman is often misinterpreted as bowling quick. That's what the fast men do; you hit them for a six and you're almost guaranteed a bouncer next ball. For a spinner, attacking has a different meaning - going slower and enticing the batsman.

Bowling slow must not be confused with giving the ball more air. The trajectory can still remain flat while bowling slow. Some batsmen are quick to put on their dancing shoes the moment the ball goes above eye level while standing in the stance, so it's important to keep the ball below their eye level and yet not bowl quick. Vettori does it with consummate ease and reaps rewards. He rarely bowls quick; he relies on changing the pace and length to deceive the batsman. And if the batsman is rooted to the crease and is reluctant to use his feet, you can flight the ball.

Add variety
The best way to not just survive but thrive as a spinner is to keep evolving.

Anil Kumble not only slowed down his pace but also added a googly to his armoury in the latter half of his career. Muttiah Muralitharan added another dimension to his bowling when he started bowling the doosra. Suraj Randiv stands tall at the crease and extracts a bit of extra bounce. Ravi Ashwin has mastered the carrom ball.

Instead of learning to undercut the ball (which is obviously a lot easier to develop), it's worth developing a doosra, a carrom ball or some other variety.

Young kids must understand that when you bowl flatter-faster deliveries, the ball behaves somewhat like a hard ball does on a concrete surface, skidding off the pitch. Slower balls, on the other hand, act like tennis balls, with far more bounce.

Up and coming spinners need to set their priorities right. They can either bend the front knee to reduce height while taking the arm away from the ear to bowl darts, or learn from the likes of Warne, Vettori, Murali and the like to succeed in all formats, provided the basics are right.

Teach history warts and all

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: March 25 2011 23:10 | Last updated: March 25 2011 23:10

“Time to head off!” wisecracks the hooded executioner on the cover of Even More Terrible Tudors, one of the popular titles in the Horrible Histories series. “I’ve got a mammoth brain!” grunts a caveman on the cover of The Savage Stone Age, holding up the dripping organ in question, while his family, sitting in the background, cooks the rest of the mammoth. History-minded schoolboys buy these books – written or co-written by the Englishman Terry Deary and aimed at presenting “history with the nasty bits left in” – by the dozens.

The idea that the history of one’s own country should be as exhilarating to young readers as, say, cars exploding or ladies in bathing suits is a peculiarly British one. When Michael Gove, education secretary, told Conservatives at their party conference last October that the narrative of children’s history courses could stand to be a bit snappier, he started an argument that has riled British historians ever since. If people are uninspired by the country’s past, Mr Gove says, “we will not properly value the liberties of the present”. Mr Gove is nationalistic to say so, but he is right. If defending one’s rights requires knowing where they came from, then learning one’s own history is indispensable.

The argument is over how best to breathe life into a mass of facts and dates. For Mr Gove, the missing element is a strong narrative, built of real protagonists facing big challenges. The government enlisted as its history adviser Simon Schama of Columbia University (and the Financial Times), who has found a way to make European and British history enthralling, both in books and on screen. Mr Gove and Mr Schama have their detractors, however. The University of California historian of Britain, James Vernon, believes teaching works best “not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically”. Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian of Germany, is not hostile to the narrative lines dear to Mr Gove and Mr Schama, but warns us against getting swept up in them. In a recent London Review of Books essay, he urges scepticism towards sources and warns students “not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with”.

This is the point on which Mr Schama and Mr Evans are most likely to agree. Mr Schama, too, has described history as a force for challenging orthodoxies, as the “greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance”. And yet, this may be the point on which classroom teachers have their deepest doubts. The intellectual independence that Messrs Schama and Evans extol characterises only a minority of published historians – why should we expect it from A-level students? Should we even want it? There are, after all, problems with teaching scepticism. The questioning of authority is indispensable and often heroic, but one needs a certain “feel” for a subject matter before one can carry it out. Until that point, scepticism is little more than a truculent contrarianism and a waste of other students’ time. It is most tellingly applied to the things one knows best. Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down.

One wonders whether this is not Mr Gove and Mr Schama’s real gripe. Mr Evans accuses them of “confusing history with memory”. But maybe memory is what young people need to be taught before they can be taught actual history. An example of this memory/ history distinction comes from Black History Month, as it is taught in US grade schools. Children spend every February either learning or rehashing the achievements of African-Americans – always in a morale-boosting way. As history, such courses have little to recommend them. To treat the deeds of the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in greater detail than those of George Washington, which is the inevitable end-result of a dedicated month, is to perpetrate a distortion.

But as memory, Black History Month has been a striking success. Children, and not just black children, quite like it. The reasons are paradoxical. Probably no pedagogical innovation was ever carried out for reasons more political, but Black History Month is the least politically correct corner of the grade-school history curriculum. You always know who the good guys are in Black History Month and their struggles are taught with an old-fashioned, un-nuanced moralism that makes Our Island Story look like Hamlet. The results are plain to see. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland released a survey of 2,000 11th- and 12th-graders (high-school leavers) who had been asked to name the 10 most significant Americans, excepting presidents. Three mainstays of Black History Month – Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman – ranked one, two and three, well ahead of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

By about the age of eight or 10, children should have a simple, logical and non-cynical narrative of their country to carry around for the rest of their lives as a net to catch knowledge in. Non-cynical, because children cannot build such a net if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart. That is the problem with teaching young people: there is a line on one side of which a teacher’s duty is to promote credulity and on the other side of which it is to promote scepticism. Errors are inevitable. But they will be self-correcting, to some extent. By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and “distance” as any educator could wish.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard