Tag Archives: Experience

Semester Moments Assorted

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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.

When you are 25

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‎25-26 is not a nice age for a man…. your ex-gfs are getting married , Your career has just started, Elders treat you as unproven theorems, College guys feel that you are too old to have in their group… You seem to enjoy both cartoon and news. You can no longer eat whatever you wish without putting on weight. You look like an ape if you don’t shave daily. You are not invited for weekend cricket matches . Every Aunty you meet asks “Shaadi kab kar rahe ho beta!!” while uncle asks “Career ka kya socha hai beta…”.. When the reality is that you are just riding the wave and going with the flow… You have all the confidence in the world but little achievements to show, You already have the first hand experience of the life , You know that whatever you have been taught about the world in schools has been sheer waste of time. You can be denied a job even after passing the test and you could be given a job if you know someone placed high enough… Politics till now was a dirty word but now you feel it everywhere. You know now love is not that blind and that friendship has its terms and conditions. .You know there is nothing for granted and free lunches are not free… Your overconfidence is now making way for a humble conscience. . You now know it is not exactly what we thought it would be….!!!

~Posted on Vijay Bhaskar’s FB Wall

What I could write

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Not that I have nothing to write, but a question ‘whether I should‘ has been troubling since a week or two. The frequency of my blogging appears to have gone down, and it feels as if I am forcing myself to write a few things. That aside, I have changed my blog theme many times in two years to keep myself interested in doing things differently. Those who have followed my blog since beginning would relate to the new change easily. This is the theme with which I began blogging. There is always a special connection my heart has to this theme. It encourages me to write things I have not thought about before!

Here is my new post then. I just thought I could present you the couple of ideas I could have written about in the last week.

  • I observed a conversation between a teacher and his old student. I recall being the student discussing with my teacher, being a teacher discussing with my student, and now, I had this opportunity to observe the conversation and have a third eye view of how it feels. As a student, I thought my teacher was always wise. As a teacher, I thought all students were alike in their concerns. And now, funnily for me, as an observer, I recognize that all teacher-old student conversations are intricately similar.
  • I observed that I had different experience teaching to two different sections of students. And the difference in experience was primarily because of the time I was spending with them. Where I had limited access to students, students paid more attention to the class, and in general, my teaching experience felt rich. And where students had more time and access to my classes, their attention was diluted, focus was dissipated, attitude was mixed and casual; this was where I felt a little out of decisive control on what and how I could teach in the class. Also, while my general disappointment with students remains as it is, there are different things I am learning from my new community of teachers. And I still find it difficult to make the students turn in their assignments in time.
I guess I have written what I wanted to. My next post I wish could be on procrastination. ;)