Text books shall have a few tock-ticks before many tick-tocks

‘Every judgment I write is a lie’ – Justice Albie Sachs, Constitutional Court, South Africa

How is that for the opening of a course to students of a university? That must have got the students to sit in attention!

I take that as the starting point for this short post of mine, on an altogether different subject – about text books.

What Sachs wanted to convey was that his judgments “did not emerge from the dispassionate placing of logical propositions in rationally ordained sequence.” To soothe students’ nerves, he clarified: “Every judgement I write tells a lie against itself,” implying that the judgment imposes order that was never even espied when it was in the making.

I teach certain subjects in the field of civil/structural engineering to undergraduate and higher level students. I find it funny that “text books” are prescribed along with the syllabus for each of the courses I teach.

Syllabus, OK, but text books? I am not so sure. Of course, to make things far less comfortable, there is also a potentially (dis)comforting list of “Learning Outcomes”, thanks to the measurement-freaks, management-types pushing education into the strait-jackets of “measurable metrics” for assessment. But, that is a different story.

Getting to text books (at least the ones prescribed for the students in the institution I am serving) are highly synchronized to the finished writing of Sachs, the final judgment in a case.

The judgment “told a story in such an orderly, clear, sequential narrative form... There would be simple forward progression – tick-tock.”

I will take the readers through a short stretch of the subject I teach – Structural Analysis; to put simply, why a structure stands and how to make one stand. The books are just like the judgment Sachs mentions. One comes before two, comes before three and erelong we are at the end. At the start of a chapter, the method is mentioned, mostly by name and not much more, and we are quickly into tick-tock – eqn. 1, 2a, 2b, 3, 4... QED.

One cannot even smell the history of the method. Oh, you say, history is for sissies. No.

In the subject under reference, each step has been a painstaking construction what precedes – think of Newton standing on the shoulders of giants who came before – true here as it is in physics. This flavour is missing in text books.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not want history stinking up a technical text book. Not at all. What I want is a whiff, just a whiff. A paragraph or two of why arches were the desired form of spanning an opening in the olden days (people did not know how to handle tension; so they sent the load down by compression); how slowly but steadily approximations in the design process are being whittled down, where they started and where they are now (think of Slope-deflection method and matrix analysis); how a particular topic came to be applied in fields, if not disparate, at least quite removed from the ones in which it made its mark (Finite Element Method from aerospace into civil engineering structures); think of the many different ways in which heat was conceived, even as a fluid before we got down a more consistent conception! So on.

There is a danger, of course. We have a very structured question paper – this many short questions (2 marks), this many 15 mark questions, this many 20 marks etc. So, imagine a text book that has a short paragraph at the beginning of a chapter that does what I have asked of it – set out the context of the topic. That is manna from heaven for our teachers who set question papers. A simple, “State how this came about.” The student has to merely regurgitate that first paragraph. Tut, tut ...

But, you cannot suggest that the opening paragraph cannot be part of the subject matter for tests/exams. Then, why have it at all? After all, over a 500 page long textbook, the publisher would have had to add say 15-20 pages because of this history/context stuff. There is no return on these pages, for the publisher, the teacher and indeed for the students also! Does not make business sense!

Here it is – the way to make business sense of history. Teachers have to invest in (study more than the prescribed “text books”, for example) first learning the historical context of the development of the field, and second, translating what they have learned into meaningful questions that set no store by rote learning, even in history!

Let us go back to Sachs and his judgments. It is not for want of tangible returns that can be put in an MS Excel sheet, he avoided the many tock-tick-tocks that his judgment clock must have made. Rather, he was duty bound to give the judgment as tick-tock.

Yes, our text books should also give a similar tick-tock narrative. But, having an initial few tock-ticks would boost the legitimacy of the latter many tick-tocks.

Raghuram Ekambaram

  

Newton and his thumb

In my retired life, I work as a faculty member in an engineering discipline in a private university in Tamil Nadu (if that sounds contradictory, so be it!).  There is a laboratory right next to my space and in it there hangs a large, yet mainly unnoticed, poster giving a profile of Sir Isaac Newton.

In that poster I noticed a quote from the scientist which goes:

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence”

Having read a number of books on evolution, having voted, rightly or wrongly, in favor of Darwin vis-à-vis Lamarck, I caught on very easily to what could have been the moving force behind Newton making the above statement, before either Lamarck or Darwin have had their say. Of course, there is no way I could be positive as no one is in a position to assert the scientist’s rationale (Googling did not get me far), but I felt quite confident.

That is when the idea struck me – why don’t I promote an essay writing competition among the students of the department, with the pot of gold at the end of rainbow being coupons at the university cafeteria, quite popular with the students, for a modest sum? As I was aware that there can be multiple interpretations and I am in no position to choose from among them, I offered ten prizes (of equal amount; the pie got shared, yet each getting a not insignificant potion) for the better write-ups.

Out of a total pool of about 400 students, less than 30 students responded; perhaps the pot of gold was not big enough, not shiny enough, but that is what I could afford. Yes, this was a personal initiative and I made sure that the department head knew about it (the only matter I engaged the services of the department was in making copies of the announcement of the competition and having them stuck onto the few notice boards in the department; of course, in the interest of weeding out, or at least diluting bias, I enlisted the services of two other professors in evaluating the submissions).

I felt an internal urge to write an essay on the topic and I give below what I wrote.

Explanation-cum-Exposition

On

 “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence”

-Sir Isaac Newton

Why did Isaac Newton refer particularly to the simple human thumb and ignored the more complex organs - say, the eyes, the heart, the kidney, the brain …?

Driven by curiosity, I compared the thumb with the other fingers and realized quickly that the thumb of one hand can meet finger pad to finger pad all the other fingers of the same hand. None of the other four fingers can do this among themselves. So, this is the difference!

But, does this difference in how the thumb operates make any significant difference in how the hand works?  I slowly tried doing everyday things, keeping the thumb away from action. I tried writing with a pen, holding it between the pad of the middle finger and the nail of the index finger. Found it hard. True, it can be done, but it requires special effort and training. It is not “natural” the way we usually write. The same goes for similar simple activities like grasping; picking up small objects; buttoning a shirt, tying a shoe lace.

So, Newton realized correctly that the thumb plays a crucial role in the operation of the hand, while enhancing its capabilities. Our “opposable” thumb rotates singly about an axis and presents both palm and outer sides to us. The other fingers cannot do this. Very few species have this facility, but even they cannot rotate the thumb or reach the other fingers to the same extent, that help in doing so many useful things.

Many other species have eyes, heart and brain but human organs are better. However, the difference is not as significant as between having and not having an “opposable” thumb.

Therefore, Newton must have considered the thumb as a gift of God to mankind.

Mankind with “opposable” thumb exists – ergo God exists!

Let me say emphatically that I did not expect any of the submissions to necessarily follow the idea behind my offering. But, boy, was I unprepared for what I got!

While a few student essays did refer to the special features of the thumb, particularly how it enhances the capabilities of the hand, they focused on the “spiritual” aspect of the quote – the fact that Newton evoked God.

Many quoted, horror of horrors, from the drivel posted on websites of Creation Science and IDiots (Intelligent Design proponents). This, coming from a university whose promoters are staunch Hindus, truly surprised me. Some of them were spot on to make the connection between the special features of the thumb and the evidence of design, though wrong it seems to have turned out in the light of Darwin’s ideas. A few observed that the human thumb is more capable than the thumbs of other species (primates) that too have “opposable” digits. But, many more said that when you stretch out your hand, the thumb directs to the sky, the supposed abode of God; hence, thumbs are special. You take your pick.

As I said earlier, I could not pick the “correct” essay. The metric I used (and requested the other evaluators to use) is a composite of focus (on the human thumb), the flow and clarity of the essay, the strength of the arguments (even wrong they may be; after all Ayn Rand made a career out of advancing wrong positions through specious arguments!), language (not copying from websites!), apparent effort taken and word limit (limited to about 300 words, give or take some). The whole exercise was indeed pleasurable, just the fact I got a window into the minds of the youngsters, what drives them and in which directions.

Yes, I was disappointed that not even 10% of the available pool participated in the competition. But perhaps the next time I float another such competition, it will attract more. Hope springs eternal.

But, there is one person who is unperturbed by the whole affair – Sir Isaac Newton! He rests in piece after having said what he wanted to say!

Raghuram Ekambaram