Lessons learned from and reinforced through Dead Poets Society

 

Dead Poets Society – How and How Much it Affected Me

Dead Poets Society was the last movie I saw in a cinema hall before leaving the US. The movie was an educational experience for me. It is not just the story line which made a mark on me, but also the performance of Robin Williams. (I had become a great fan of his right from the days of his sitcom Mork & Mindy and the movie Moscow on the Hudson.)

He played the role of John Keating, an English teacher in a high school saturated by snobbery; the parents wanted their wards in engineering, medicine, finance and such remunerative careers that cry out their status. No philosophy, fine arts, languages etc.

Keating talks about different perspectives of anything in life and also about its uncertainties, Carpe Diem. Guess how he demonstrates this–climbs up on his desk and looks around the classroom and claims that the room and the students do look different from his perch. Through this and other moments in the movie I established a kinship with John Keating, and through him to Robin Williams.

When I was teaching the course Engineering Mechanics to a motley group of first year engineering (including computer science and biotechnology) students in a private university, in one class, I went to the door, looked out both ways into the aisle to see if anyone was coming, came back and–here is where the kinship was reinforced–I climbed up on the desk and jumped down, leaving the students agape, just as the students of John Keating felt at his stunt. It was not a stunt of course, it was serious stuff; so was my act.

No, I did not meaninglessly copy John Keating in this act. I may have even forgotten that scene in the movie–I did that to teach a fundamental concept behind motion of several connected bodies! My idea was to show that we may, subscribing to certain assumptions and making reasonable approximations, idealize our body as a set of connected rigid bodies: Foot, shin, thigh, pelvic structure, torso, arms, neck and head. When I landed on the floor, my body came to stop sequentially, each part coming to a stop just a moment after the part below it stopped. I have done similar demonstrations using routines in gymnastics, diving, short put, javelin throw and many other sports events. I also told the students why they leaned towards the inside of a curve when they ran circles around the room, when they were toddlers having just learned to run.

In one more scene, Keating asked his students to “[T]hink for yourselves.” Yes, he did. I started every semester asking students in each section to, you guessed it, “Think for yourself.” Yet, there is a difference–I start off telling them that I will not be thinking for them, and they have to do it for themselves. That shocked everyone.

I stressed a lot on “understanding” and used to elaborate through an example. In an engineering context, understanding comes about through questioning the assumptions, taking in the implied logic, asking why we approximated some parameter and not others and such. I go beyond what the usual books students refer to offer qualitatively; they are too sharply focused on quantitative answers, the expert engineers the students are going to be! But, there is more to engineering than mere numbers.

I emphasize that the students should try to understand the questions first, and only then jump to answering questions. They immediately ask me, “What could be there to understand in the questions?” They all travel in the rutted path … plug in the input numbers into the equations and get the answers.

I surprised them with a problem from their high school math, solving a set of simultaneous equations (two equations with three unknowns). Only a handful of students, and only after some effort, admit they cannot. I never needed to say anymore. I did ask myself why their school teachers had not mentioned this most elementary idea in algebra. Students, even more basically, do not even know the concept of "taking the limit as 'x' goes to zero"; 'x' can never reach zero value. This can be and preferably should be taught through a demonstration. Alas!

Keating says the abve, perhaps more strongly, given that he is teaching English poetry. “Understand.” Understanding poetry is a lot harder, nearly impossible for me, than understanding math, geometry, engineering etc. Understanding is not needed in biology because you cannot ask the easy question, Why?” Nature has done it …

Let me ask you, my readers, this: “Why is it nearly impossible to pry open the fingers of a newborn?” There is a half-way answer to this “why?” question, and we cannot go beyond.

The last item is the singular one: Keating treats each one of his students the same, I mean identically. He was fingered by one student as possibly the culprit, not legally but at least socially, for a student’s suicide. Keating was dismissed. That is the gut wrenching scene, most inappropriate in a movie that I went to with a date.

In this segment, Keating asks for the name of a student to respond to him personally, and cracks a joke on the response in the lightest manner possible; there is no maliciousness, and the target understands it perfectly. I admit that I have done that, as it is in my nature to make a classroom interaction as informal as possible (except for the students to address me any way, as my preference, by my name, does not match the institutional norms), but failed at least in one instance. I have had the misfortune of having identical twins in my class. I could never separate each and fuse it to his/her name (one is a set of boys, and the other, girls). If I had to call them out, it was not by their names, but by where they are sitting. A mild insult to the individuals, I reckon.

On a serious note, a girl student’s name is, per the current fashion, yucky, (I use this adjective advisedly; though the name has Sanskrit in it), and I cracked a joke with no malice in that per my tone (it was also the name of my maternal grandmother). But, immediately I realized I have crossed the Rubicon in the wrong direction. I apologised to the student loudly in the class itself. Now, we are good friends. I wish she would read this part of this post of mine and dispute me if there is any mistake.

I would watch Dead Poets Society as many times as I can, any and all snippets available on YouTube. Perhaps you should too, at least once.

Raghuram Ekambaram