Tag Archives: Teachers

Plagiarism keeps everyone happy, but…

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An editorial in The Hindu today started my day with a question: How do we avoid plagiarism in institutions? The question haunted me for about an year by now. I came to college with long thoughts about this. Especially, that some universities promote “open book  examination” and yet they manage to weed out plagiarism; but how is the question that remained. I conducted an exam today, open book one, to see how my students respond to this. Just like I thought, not wanted, they gave me copied answers, word to word. It felt as if there was no real value addition, but then all that a teacher can do is limited to suggesting and directing–persuasion is an option sometimes. So, I did suggest that plagiarism is in a way limiting their imaginative abilities, and that they can get away from this habit by trying to paraphrase to begin with. I thought I had made a reasonable step forward.

But then some piece of information gives me a hint that plagiarism prevails in the institution even in teaching! Wohoo! I am not talking about information sharing, intellectually stimulating discussions, or teaching methodology, but I am talking about “getting to know what happens in other class through students, and then repeating the same in some other class“. Hmm! Honestly, I appreciate it at some level, because one person works for his class, and the students of some other class also benefit from it. At least, its worth was well recognized because some other teacher copied it; only there is no ownership, and only there is no imagination any further. I sometimes pity the students who become instruments of such teachers as to assisting them information about other teachers/classes (a culture I came running away from). They do not understand that they are hurting the system by doing things that are not their job.

Any explanation I offer now seems to me of little use, because of the happy climate that prevails. I understand, plagiarism is keeping everyone happy, including me though I am copied. But then, the question that started my day still follows… How do we get rid of it? Academics can be lot better without plagiarism, but how do we convince the stakeholders? Any more ideas…

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.

Teacher Communication Style – I

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Smothergill, Olson, and Moore have studied the effect of teacher communication style in the pre-school child development. Picking up from and slightly modifying the Bernstein’s linguistic codes, they initially hypothesized that teachers could be classified into two groups having distinct communication styles, elaborative and non-elaborative. They then picked a sample of teachers and observed them in their sessions for over a 10-week period. The result of this observation was a finer classification of all communication the teachers were involved in a normal classroom session; and now it included four categories namely directive, elaborative, eliciting, and non-information support.

Directive statements were those involving a minimum of information necessary for the teacher to direct the action or behaviour of the child. Elaborative statements were those which conveyed more information than was essential for completing a task. Eliciting statements consisted of verbal requests from the teacher for verbal feedback from the child. Non-information support statements included statements which were intended to show recognition to a child, to indicate hearing his statement or question, but which conveyed no added information.

Interestingly, their observation identified that all student communication could also be, with minor modifications, categorized into four groups: spontaneous, teacher-elicited, child-elicited, and ego centric in nature. The commonality among both these classifications among teacher communication style and student communication is that there can be more than one component on display at any time. Consider for an example, student communication in classroom, that can be both teacher-elicited and ego centric in nature. In statistical terms, it means these categories exhibit multicollinearity.

Later on, the research sought to verify if a specific style of teacher communication could result in improved student performance. So the researchers developed five tasks: circuit board task, maze task, similarities task, story-telling task, and a puzzle task. The idea is to have two groups of students, one group trained by teachers with elaborative communication style, and the other with the non-elaborative communication style. The scores of the students on these tasks pre and post the teaching sessions would be measured, and the difference in scores would reflect the improvement in performance. Communication style of the teacher of the group that exhibits better improvement in performance would then be concluded as being effective. Necessary care was taken to ensure the sanctity of research design.

The results of the study indicated that the group of students taught by a teacher with elaborate communication style showed better improvement, definitely. However, the difference in the improvement that they have shown over the group taught by teacher with non-elaborative communication style, was not statistically significant, on three of the five tasks developed. The two tasks where the difference was significant were the similarities task and the story-telling task. This means a lot in terms of communication style research. These are tasks which demand use of language, and it seems that elaborative communication style was more suitable to the need there.

Eventful changes, and Fascinating Life

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In the last one week, I observed my life taking turns that I never even once anticipated. Events which I have yearned for a long time also began to happen.

My first publication came out, and interestingly its first author is my life partner. This is hard to understand, since I was waiting for a publication which would have me as the first author and her as the co-author. May be it is destined, and I am happy about it.

On the same note, I thought my second publication would be co-authored with a professor, my role model. Believe me! That paper was submitted six months back. And the paper that is coming out second is actually with a student of mine, perhaps a student who sees me as a model, though I am not the one to comment on it.

My parents have always thought that, with the wider reach that I was aiming for in reading, I would read parapsychology one day; and I always believed it is a crazy thought. But now, I am actively involved in discussions with researchers in parapsychology, and somewhere I have to admit – I am reading and am interesting in continuing to read.

Introvert I thought I was. And a few days back, a personality test revealed that I was an introvert. Socializing was a difficult process. And from where and how I do not know, but those special two came in my life. One, a professor who recently authored a book, and two, a librarian who showed me a new hope in my research. They may think otherwise, but I announce that they impacted my life more than they think they have.

Non-value adding work was a frequent term in my conversations. And now, I am beginning to find value in whatever is happening around me, lest which how would the world be, after all? Work was drudgery and demanding, and I thought it killed autonomy. And now, I don’t see it demanding. May be I am a freer being now, and I value spending time with the loved ones. Work would eventually be done, don’t it?.

The way I teach is beginning to show me my own style. So far, I imagined myself as my role model professor and tried imitating him. But now I realize that originality has its virtues. And I am evolving in my role. My students, and the way they interact is beginning to show me the difference. I want to thank them for making me feel good and letting me rediscover my role.

Very irritated with my life, I wanted to be different and tried donning a variety of looks to get myself away from boredom. Now I realize that my looks don’t matter that much, and that it is not the only way to make my life interesting. So lucky I am to have such caring parents and sweet little sister who think of me day and night, and tolerate me for all my misdeeds, and love me even for the ignorance I have shown to them. I can do nothing but tell them ‘I love you’ with a drop of tear in my eyes.

Life just means more to me with my life partner teaching me what to do with it. Without her little nuggets of wisdom to regulate me, I would have ended up an invisible critique. Now, I think my life is more resourceful to all those who are with me, around me, and lead me.

My friends have been influential in what I was. And now I see them changing, perhaps, we are all maturing in our thoughts. How can I imagine a life without them, and with who else can I share my life’s little secrets!

And I am writing with a smile; my blog is just showing me avenues to identify and rediscover who I am, and what I can do. I realize that I have limitations too, and that I can do only a fraction of all that is possible. This extended part of me, now, is what lets me learn how to enjoy. What else could I say?

Life is just beginning to be so.. fascinating!