Phew! As I solve the eleventh hour queries of students troubled with what is gobbled up through the course of a semester, I found few challenging ones that observed my attention. Curse or thank the mediocrity of those instant guides that are popularly used every examination season; I have learnt a point or two more within my subject, not because they had better lessons, but they had problems confounded in such manner that they forced me to explore more. So, here we go with the three questions:

Question One: Why do we select the point of intersection that is closest to the horizontal axis when we solve games using graphical method?

Question Two: In a transportation problem, why do we form a circuit when we want to identify how much the allocation should be modified and where?

Question Three: If we talk of Six sigma, is it really about accommodating six standard deviations in the process or should it be about reducing the absolute standard deviation?

Goodness me, there is some talent out there.

That is not all I had this semester. There were a couple of embarrassing moments that is attributed to the efforts to try and over teach (not so desirable) and to the efforts of trying to explain the fundamentals more than required (no so needed, I find now). The first moment, I missed computing the standard deviation and got the problem wrong, and it took me a second after stepping out of the class to identify what mistake I committed. But the twenty minutes I struggled in the class remains an experience. On the second moment, I explained game theory very convincingly through out only spoiling one last procedure. I had forgotten substituting calculated values in the original equations to find out the whole range of values required.

If you think these were silly, I am assuming (actually I shouldn’t hope) the students caught more than what I had known myself committing in lectures.

If I were to mention one significant learning from this semester of teaching, I would say it, but it would not be ground-breaking. I figured out that supplying material to students prior to the class is as effective as supplying no material. The later can at least save me some time and energy.

What would I be doing next semester? I am eagerly planning things.