Gardening, astronomy? Visit varsity

MUMBAI: What could a teenaged south Mumbai college student and a 49-year-old railway fitter from Vasai have in common? Not much on weekdays, perhaps. But on Sundays, they���re both students at the weekend certificate courses conducted by Mumbai University���s Centre for Extra Mural Studies. And they both love them.
From archaeology to gardening and astronomy to ancient Indian arts and sciences, weekend courses have something for everyone.Prior knowledge of the field is not required.
���I don���t know anything about science, but I���ve always wanted to learn a bit about astronomy,������ said 41-year-old Janki Jogle, a Vedanta teacher. ���The course is fantastic,������ enthused Jogle, who went on overnight stargazing trips to Lonar and Mamnoli with her fellow-students.
If the subject that interests you isn���t on offer, and if you can cobble together a group of 20 people who share your interest, the Centre for Extra Mural Studies will try to identify faculty members and offer the course.
���We���re very selective about our faculty. We want teachers who are passionate about the subject,������ said Mugdha Karnik, who heads the Centre. Those who teach the weekend courses are professionals in their field. For example, C K Salunkhe, the instructor for the gardening course, is a horticulturist with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
The centre takes student feedback very seriously. ���In the rare instance that the student feedback for a teacher is poor, the teacher will not be invited to teach the course again,������ said Karnik.
Little wonder, then, that students from diverse backgrounds, and of ages ranging from 19 to over 70, are happy with the courses.
���I sometimes put in an extra day at work and even skip holidays so that I can attend the weekend gardening course,������ said Pramod Kumar Raul, a 49-year-old railway fitter from Vasai. He said the course greatly helped him understand the science of gardening. ���Often, I���d wonder why my plants were dying, or not growing as well as they should. Now I know what went wrong,������ he added.
Student diversity adds to the fun of the course. For instance, many of Raul���s younger classmates fondly call him ���chacha������. One girl even asked him for some plant clippings, because he was so good at growing them.
At the other end of the age spectrum is 19-year-old Andre Baptista, a student at Wilson College, who has always been passionate about history and is now an avid student in the weekend course in archaeology. Baptista, who had learnt about Ashoka Maurya���s stupas in the fourth standard, got to see them for real during a field trip to Madhya Pradesh as a part of the archaeology course. ���The experience was thrilling,������ he said.
���Our students are so interested in the subject that they often stay back after hours to ask questions on what they���ve read,������ said Kurush Dalal, a teacher of the archeology course, and added that students weren���t spoofed notes. ���They come to class to listen and absorb what we���re saying, after which they need to do a lot of reading,������ he said.
As the term ���extra mural������ (beyond the walls) suggests, field work is an important aspect of these courses. For instance, C S Lattoo, who heads the taxonomy course, takes his students to many nature spots in Mumbai, such as the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and Sagar Udyan (Bombay Port Trust Garden). ���I show my students live specimens of what they���re studying,������ said Lattoo. At Sagar Udyan, for example, students learn that the salt-resistant plants growing along the sea-facing side of the garden form a natural screen that protects the more delicate plants inside.
The flexibility of the courses is perhaps their strongest point. Teachers are free to design the curriculum, and students have the option of skipping the exam at the end of the course.
anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com