HEALTHCARE · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE · PATIENT EXPERIENCE Years ago, at a government hospital, I heard a surgeon say about a patient who kept asking him, "She must be a teacher." He was half-joking. She turned out to be one. It became my private joke: anyone who asks that many questions must be a teacher. I didn't know I'd think of that remark again. I think of it now because the patient who asks too many questions is no longer rare. She is in my family. Perhaps you have encountered her, too. A new kind of conversation My mother, my uncles, and my aunts are not medical professionals. When an unfamiliar symptom appears, they don't know the terminology, the likely causes, or the right questions to ask. But they have found ChatGPT and Gemini, and they talk to them like buddies. A symptom prompts a question, an answer prompts another, and nobody waits. Voice input matters most. They don't have to type a carefully worded query or know the medical term. They speak...
I was no wizard, still scared of Mathematics as I was before in my schooldays. Maths included arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. I was good in algebra and geometry, but arithmetic failed me at every step. Multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction scared me then and continue to do the same even today. Careless mistakes were a rule the more I tried the more disastrous were the results. This vicious cycle ended only when I opted for biology in class twelve.
Math is an integral part of life, this realisation helped me lay stronger foundations for my children. My progeny inheriting my math gene was a scary thought. I slipped everywhere in life in all the calculations, but I never wished this for my children so, I decided to give them a head start. A mathematical mind which I craved even for myself.
The early remembrances of mathematical marvels were my maternal grandmother and her sister who could do oral calculations of the grocery bought by their staff and the transactional differences which never went unnoticed.
The process began with my elder son doing counting exercises, mental math, oral math, what comes before/after, tables, dodging. I would initially tell him counting by sticks as
When addition was perfected, we would move on to subtraction then to multiplication and then to division. Five problems of each continued every day.
Tables and dodging were an everyday feature. While he dressed up for school our session on dodging tables continued, the rule of five was never broken. Meanwhile, my second son too had joined the same schedule but both boys were different.
With my younger son I had to be always on the move. When I was not moving, he was running in the room, and we were allowing carelessness. As time passed with him too carelessness began to disappear, and he started taking pride in scoring the highest marks in class.
Sometimes we even had a contest with my husband and my sons as opponents trying to beat each other sometimes my younger one would join any one of them sometimes he would be a cheerleader at other he would sit by the fence and be the scorekeeper. He too adapted to our methods easily and quickly.
As they scaled the ladders of class, they carved their own milestones, while we continued as their biggest cheerleaders.
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