“I made a mistake”

 

“I made a mistake”

As the visitors to my posts are fewer than the birds that visit a barren bird sanctuary, I am going personal here. There are no interesting things in it for the others. This is all about me, the egoist or the egotist, I do not know.

In the previous phase of my life I pretended to be a teacher, a professor no less, in a Deemed-to-be private university, no more. I am not putting my then employer down; indeed, it was a much-needed halfway house for nearly ten years between my focused and dedicated professional life over the earlier three decades or so and the fully retired life I am leading now.

I was very animated in my class, extending beyond body language. I used my body as a whole in my teaching. I had already described how I climbed up the desk and jumped off of it, merely to give a body-demonstration for a concept. That was just one instance and I may have done a couple of dozen such actions, including in higher level classes extending to PG courses.

I seemed to have developed a contrarian personality in my professional life. Because of my research work towards getting my Ph.D, and ended up in a design office, I was academic and research oriented while I was doing and/or overseeing design. Subsequently, when I was in academia, I focused on the industry aspects of the discipline. I was putting myself in jeopardy during both these phases!

It is therefore not surprising that I found not much satisfaction during the transition as it was like falling through the cracks. Very few of my colleagues enjoyed teaching and gave themselves to it as much as I tried doing. I had moderate success. For my former colleagues, teaching was not a profession, but merely a bread-winning tactical issue in life; short-termism winning against, as always, long-term perspectives. While there is enough blame to go around, a major share must be with the administration and their meaningless metrics. I hate measuring things that cannot be measured.

I have to tell you how I judged my own teaching, style and substance. It could have been better, much better. I knew, going in, that I have to control my bad temper, many times directed at myself, that used to erupt. The antidote was for me to treat myself as grandfather of the students (age-wise, I was almost there, especially along their maternal line) and grandfathers do not, as a rule get angry at their granddaughters and grandsons.

Subject-wise I got frustrated whenever I made a mistake while writing on the board. I will be saying something and write something else on the board. The students, bless them, pointed out my error almost on the spot. I quickly regained my composure externally but seethed within myself. After the class I used to analyze why I made the mistake. I also got angry at the students as a whole (rarely at any individual; perhaps at a group of five or six students) when I felt the class is being disrupted and I am losing my train of thoughts.

One day, while I was pacing the corridors waiting for the clock to strike my class hour, I saw a math professor showing his graduate student a contraption that seemed to show something rolling up an incline. I was aware of this trick, which is really not a trick. I borrowed this contraption and brought it to my class. When I did the demonstration, the class was perplexed. Then I cleared their confusion. All was well for the fundamentals they have been taught. I demonstrated the same thing to my colleagues too were, but unwilling to admit to being baffled till they heard my explanation. The Dean of the School of Civil Engineering asked me pointedly from where I got the contraption (the double cone and the splayed and gradually raising tracks). I told him and was hoping he would act the change agent. Alas, my hopes were belied.

I was designated the faculty for a course that was ostensibly designed to help PG students develop presentation skills on core topics of the profession. From my perspective, I did OK or better than that. What was the icing on the cake was that the faculty member who was the teacher for this course earlier gave me a pat on the back saying the standard of the presentation of the students were more varied and better than what they were under him. To be fair, he was a faculty who was tuned to a different sub-field.

While I was delivering a lecture. I questioned my class frequently on the implications of the concepts I had explained. Only a few students (say, five out of 60 in a class) responded, sometimes correctly and many times not. What was, I think, unique about these instances was I went to the student, particularly when their understanding may not have been correct or they struggled to put the concepts in words, and asked him/her what they meant and repeated it in my own words. This is the best part. I now asked the student whether my translation of their query was faithful. Not once did they answer in the negative, not once. My translation sought to direct the students towards applying the concepts in a fruitful direction. I can tell you that this was effective, at least with the chosen few.

No, I did not choose them. They chose themselves by participating in the class. However, in the semester-end feedback students give their teachers (to the administration which is shared with the faculty), one response was: The teacher has his favourites and he goes to them to the exclusion of others. The first two sentences of this paragraph is my defence against the charge. Enough said.

Before I joined academia as a paid worker, I was a structural design engineer and also an experimentalist (for five years). Therefore, I do vouch for, if only partially, the chorus from the industry that graduates are not prepared for the real demands of professional life. What goes unsaid is the industry has handed the kit and caboodle of the responsibility of making practising professionals of graduates’ professional education to edupreneurs.

When I graduated, more than fifty years ago, was it the same situation? Perhaps not. I did not go into industry after graduation but some of my classmates did. I have heard from them that it was different, at least slightly; the transition was smoother with a series of “punctuated equilibria” – a stepped process, within a compressed time frame.

Alright, I will now get to the most weighty messages of this post. In Richard Feynman’s Messenger lecture at Cornell University, there is a short segment in which the redoubtable scientist said, with no ifs and buts, “I made a mistake” at 38:50. Admittedly, it was merely on the sequencing of the slides and he had, while taking an ad-hoc swipe at astrology, lost the thread of his thoughts.

 This is about as honest as honest can be. It runs the risk of losing the audience. Yet, he seemed not to have cared. True, he was a complete legend by the time of the lecture. I have read a letter from him to a student where he admitted to his mistake on a truly substantive issue without hedging. That is confidence. A teacher must have confidence in themselves to readily admit to an error. I have done this without fail in my classes. The thing that was bad about me was I made mistakes in many of my lectures. I am not blaming my mild dyslexia (see, I hedged! Feynman did not).

Feynman had a sense of humour that was cutting as well as mildly stated.  In the YouTube video you witness these instances during 17:36-17:46 (just 10 seconds) about angels flapping their wings to move the earth, and at 31:00 minutes, this one taking down his host institution, for thinking that astronomy is exclusively an outdoors endeavour, but in a humorous way. This I lacked and I admit, I could not have developed.

 

In one of my first lectures to the class on the subject Engineering Mechanics, I asked the students, “What is mass?” The anticipated response is a version of, “Matter content of a body,” as given in their school text books, and my expectation was endorsed. I used to pounce on it, and ask, “Is that a scientific/engineering answer? Do you ‘understand’ anything engineering about a body through that ‘definition,” and a few more choice questions, to make the students uncomfortable.

I deliberately wanted to induce such discomfort to wean the students away from their high school learning mentality. Then I tell them that mass is merely the constant of proportionality between the force (another undefined concept) and acceleration, which is a defined concept (if one agrees that time is a concept!) This is almost precisely I heard Feynman mouth in his lecture at 19:30 minutes (Mass as the Coefficient of Inertia in Newton’s Second Law of Motion) in the video. I put a feather in my cap.

It is more than one feather. I had a discussion with a colleague from a different school at the university who had done research from IIT, Kanpur on quantum chemistry (the thing he told me to impress, I suppose), in which I pointed out that mass is nothing more than the proportionality constant, and is applicable if the equation is inverted, like . He did not agree and went tangentially, saying F is a tensor (he thought he would bamboozle me by throwing this fancy word; he did not know I spent a year using tensor in my research) and one cannot divide a tensor. I pointed out that I was teaching first year students of engineering. He shut up after that and our interactions stopped. He was using fancy words not for clear exposition but just the opposite. If Feynman is ever against anything, it is this. So, I felt I got a pat on the back from him!

So, that is the part of, exclusively of the final phase, my professional career.