Tag Archives: Students

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.

Maturity, In an appraisal…

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In my first informal appraisal at the new college, I received a few drops of wisdom from my superior. He said:

“A teacher must have maturity. Maturity to not blame students for their failure, maturity to accept that their impressions on teacher could be short-sighted, and maturity to understand that the only way to get an acceptance from student community is to teach better. A teacher’s maturity is reflected in his ability to control the ignorance of the student.” Continue reading →

What students talk…

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I had to delay writing this till now, because I was excited watching India put it in for England as a payoff for what they got in the last series. It feels fantastic to see India winning. So I get into the story of the day now.

Incident One:

I was tying my shoe laces in the playground as I overheard this conversation of a student with her friend over the phone. She was animated as she said,

“That is what he does always. The lab assistant is a moron. When I ask him a doubt, he has only one response, which is to suggest me to consult the senior faculty. What kind of an idiot he must be. When I ask him for clarification in the lab work itself, he comes in and shouts out to read the question again, only a little slowly. And honestly, we don’t understand anything. Just imagine! Why would we ask him a doubt if we could understand what is written in the question? He doesn’t have brain at all. Once when I asked for further clarification on a question, he started scolding me for not paying attention when he explained, but all he did was to actually shout out the question only more slowly. How do people think, talking slowly can clarify doubts, unless they are elaborating on the concept? And then, these people think of themselves as Pundits in their subject.”

All I could do was give her a smile and board my bus back home. :)

Incident Two:

While I was walking back to the department from library, I found a couple of lazy asses having a chat. The sitting lazy ass was requesting (it wouldn’t be nice if I said royal begging!) the standing lazy ass to get him a cool drink. Just as the standing lazy ass moved his butt, he found two girls walking in that direction, perhaps his classmates. Now, the standing lazy ass orders (literally!) to one of those girls to get a drink for him and for the sitting lazy ass. I can’t still figure out why the girls have accepted that piece of crappy job, but just as they moved a feet further, story takes another turn. The sitting lazy ass now gets into a tiff with the standing lazy ass asking why he delegated the job he was supposed to do (he was perhaps trying to save his face by getting on the girls’ side). And now, the standing lazy ass says, “You should use girls, at least like this”. What a moron he must have been to have said that? All that those girls could do was to look at me for a second, turn down their faces, and briskly walk away from that place. I am sure, those lazy asses have not yet figured out what they had done to those girls’ self-respect, as the bystanders and on-movers were watching the scene.

From both incidents, I could observe one feature common: that these students have absolutely no sense of ‘who is where’, ‘who is listening’, and ‘what to talk’.

God. Please spare my senses from witnessing such incidents which make me believe that your creation itself was by mistake.