Hello, Yesterday me and my colleagues at Pratham Education Foundation, India attended a workshop on assembling and using a “Foldscope” microscope conducted by Manu Prakash, Jim, Tom, Marie, Laks and other people from Stanford USA. We took up the project of observing different variety of Pollen grains from different flowers. This is my first post to share with the community of foldscope users what we found. The shape of all the pollen we collected were similar to a grain of wheat except in the case of Pollen from Hibiscus Flower which looked like a star. Later we were told by Laks that all the flowers we collected belonged to sunflower family hence their pollen were same. Now I am curious to find out how many different kind of pollen shapes are there and looking at the shape of pollen we can know which different looking flowers are actually of same family. Looking foreword to collecting more samples. Suddenly I am looking at a flower not as one single entity but as something belonging to a family whose outward appearance may be completely different.

Yesterday at home when I was playing with the foldscope, my 5 year old nephew got curious about what I was doing. I showed him something which even I did not know what it was. It was a sample given to us at the workshop. It was an underwater plant. Under the lens it looked like grass but there was some brown colored circular disc floating in it. It even had a distinct center like a nucleus. My nephew asked me what was it? I had no idea what to say. But I felt very uncomfortable not being able to tell my nephew what we were looking at. I then showed him another sample. Nephew again asked me what it is? I told him it was the leg of a mosquito. My nephew did not believe me. Then I took out the slide and showed him the actual mosquito leg. Then I told him how the foldscope made everything big.

Similar thing happened a day before in a school where I showed the foldscope to some 30 students.

The first question always regarding a sample is, “what is it? What are we looking at?”  Things are fine when the description is linked with something they already know like the leg of a mosquito or the surface of a leaf. But moment we encounter something even I have no idea, we do not know what to talk.

We saw holes on a leaf and I told them it is stomata. Now even I don’t know what actually a stomata looks like, but since I had read about it in a textbook I assumed it must be stomata.

I have observed that I can communicate with students only when I give a name to something. If I dont know the name of something, the communication stops. Suppose I did not know what a stomata is, then what would I say what these holes on the leaf are? Then maybe I would say, this is where the plant breathes in and out air like we do from our nose. But even that function of the holes I need to know before hand to have some sensible communication with children. But when I don’t know how to describe something, the communication stops. Then the interest in the sample only relies upon some sensational appearance of the sample like the claws of an ant or some colorful or moving thing and that generates a high but very short term interest in the sample. Immediately the desire to see something more visually exciting takes over and children want to see something else, loosing interest in the previous sample. The whole experience is in the entertainment zone.

Question is isn’t the teacher or the facilitator need to have some basic knowledge in microbiology. What are the most basic things and concepts that we need to have previous knowledge of even to make sense of something unknown? There is a general tendency of human mind to relate the unknown with something that we already know. I don’t know if this tendency is good or bad. If it is bad, then how else can we make the unknown, known and communicate and talk about it with each other?

In this forum, for a person like me who is an outsider to the world of microbiology, the first thing that strikes me of course are the images and videos of exotic beings, but also the TERMS used which only an “insider” can understand. So isn’t knowing some basic terms a prerequisite to be able to at least communicate with each other, with students and with the community about things that we are observing?

I automatically see myself looking at the dictionary to make sense of what most people are talking about in this forum. It still looks like a club of microbiologists with their own language. How does general public enter into it if not through language of microbiology.

I soon realized that I am not just looking at some samples for fun sake, but I am actually entering the world of microbiology with all its terminology that people in the community are using.

How can we, the general public communicate without knowing basic terms of microbiology?