Monday, May 29, 2006

Welcome Gyaanis

Here is the master plan for which this blog has been created :

There are 47 sessions in all in Word Power Made Easy - Norman Lewis. Many people start it, but few end it. The purpose here is to have a collective plan to study it over a period of about 10 weeks.

I assume we will have participation from 5 active members for the same. Each member is required to read one session in a week, and after that write a session of his own, in which he or she elaborates on what was in the session, add more examples if required, come up with anything plain or innovative, cite examples etc.

This session would be posted on a blog created for this purpose, which is gyaanis.blogspot.com. We could have carried on with just mails on the group, but it becomes chaotic keeping their record, so a blog would be excellent for this purpose, since we can have the discussions also in a more readable form by commenting on the posts.

The idea is that anyone reading that post should be very comfortable with the words in that session. We can give examples of people/places/events around us, any joke we have in common etc so that we can relate more to it. This part of making the post interesting is important, since otherwise everyone can just read the book itself. Anyhow, if you think a word is too simple or cannot be elaborated, just write the meaning or quote from the book.

Optional : If individual words are being talked about, they can be rated as 1, 2 or 3 depending on our current familiarity with them. (1) will be marked for words that we already know, (2) for those we are familiar with, but not too comfortable, and (3) for words we have no idea about. Definitely it might vary from person to person, but the person writing the session can be allowed to give the ratings. Similar rating may be given to the session as a whole. This will hlp us in revising the difficult ones.

Immediate Action Required :

Deciding on the 5th member... Gaurav, Manas, Priyank, Shweta and who else? Mickey, Ayush and Kirti need to be asked.

Dividing the sessions - I propose we have one day for everyone, and take up the sessions consecutively.

What is the starting date? Can we keep it as 1st June, or should we start from next Monday, which is 5th of June?

Constraints/Limitations :

The sessions are not independent, they are grouped in 3-5 sessions dealing with the same essential topic. So we have to take them up accordingly.

Certain sessions are very extensive since they go deep into etymology. It would be a challenging task to write your own session for them. But come to think of it, each one of us has to write just 10 sessions, out of which may be 5 would be extensive. We can surely do that much.

The tests will have to be taken independently, however they may be discussed.

It would be great if we can find out the online version of this book, then we can copy the tests too from there.

There are certain 'Brief intermissions' in between, which may be read individually or if the idea catches up, or we can find a 6th person who can help just with those intermissions, we can take them up too, anytime in the week. The plan cannot be delayed for them.

It is intended that we will finish this exercise by mid-August so that we can carry on with more extensive prep of Quant and DI after that, when the mocks start.

In case any one of you do not like the idea, or feel you are too busy, please feel free to opt out or recommend changes. But once we are into this, we will have to give our best to the one session that we are required to post in a week, and there will be no acceptable excuses for not doing it. Remember, we are striving to be managers, and the first step is to discipline ourselves.

The adventure of knowledge is just as important as the knowledge of adventure...

Lets begin the adventure...