At GEAR teachers don't just teach but facilitate learning. A variety of methods and tools are used to spark curiosity and interest within a child. Math, Science, History and Languages are learned through board games, puzzles, hands-on activities and experiments, music or some other method that would make a child look forward to learning something new. Some examples: Students once built a contraption to measure an individual’s height, without going near them with a measuring tape. What topic could they possibly have been studying? Well, it was trigonometry. Usually a dreaded subject, these
students tackled it in a way that worked for them. The students used Trigonometric formulae to calculate what a person’s height would be if they stood at a particular distance from their contraption (which included a very large protractor to find out the angle that would be needed in the formula.) Another time, students learned about freezing points, and how salt reduces water’s freezing point through the interesting (not to mention tasty) method of making ice cream.
Weightless Bags: Sadly, it is a common sight to see children carrying large and heavy bags, making it look like the children could topple over backwards at any moment. To combat this sad plight, which can even lead to health risks to the children, a different system is used at GEAR.
Instead of carrying notebooks, children are instead provided with booklets with perforated paper. The Cubs are provided with a set of booklets to keep in their classroom and one set to keep at their homes at the beginning of the year. This way, if an assignment needs to be submitted an entire booklet need not be carried, instead a child would just carry the sheets of paper that the assignment was written on.
The textbooks are also not carried up and down every day but are kept in the individual cubby holes that each child has in their classroom.
Filing System: To keep track of all the loose sheets of paper, a filing system is used. The habit of maintaining their papers is inculcated in the students through this method. Each subject has a separate file, within which students file their respective papers. To help keep them organised and up to date, a dedicated time slot is given at the end of the week, for the students to sort out their papers and files.