Nothing. Nothing at all, will prepare you for teaching - except
perhaps, ummm... teaching.
A gruelling Ph.D. and a labourious postdoc later, teaching was
supposed to be easy. At least, it seemed easy when I was a student. I
would have never known otherwise had I not crashed into a class full
of young though stolid faces staring at me with what seemed like a
mixture of amusement, curiosity and disapproval. But I am getting
ahead of myself.
Let's start from the time the course was announced. CS475. Computer
Graphics. I thought it is not a difficult subject to like and it
seemed fairly easy to win over kids who walked into my room, starry
eyed, asking will I teach how to program computer games in my
class. My first impulse was to answer in the affirmative. But then I
started wondering, Will I?
The question of What should I teach? caught me unawares like the
sudden chaotic cacophony that drowns anybody who walks out the gates
of this hallowed campus. What should be aim of my course - what do I
want my students to learn from this first course on Computer
Graphics? I expected them to fall in love with the subject, but then
how does one teach that!
Coupled to this was the question of how to teach the subject. Use
slides and notes only. Or use the board and engage the class in
discussions. When I was a student, I remembered how easy it was to
fall asleep in classes to the soothing monotonic sounds of
read-aloud-from-slides lectures. Now, were my lectures to suffer the
same fate? The lectures had to be visual because Graphics is a visual
subject. Demonstrations seemed to be a must because experience told me
that all the beautiful math in the book can fail miserably in practice
because engineering a program to do Graphics correctly is
difficult. Yet, the very fact that the math is beautiful in itself, is
difficult to get through in the first place! It seemed like I would
never ever get started.
But a deadline often does wonders. And so the course started because
it had to, on a certain date. I walked into class, armed with slides,
notes, movies, demos and a bag full of confusion and
apprehension.
First lecture. Introduction to the subject was easy enough. Even the
announcement of the first written homework was taken with just a
murmur of dissent. Even though talking non-stop for one and a half
hour left me with a very sore throat, I came back with a content smirk
on my face, thinking things were finally looking up. Little did I
know, I was heading into a Venus Flytrap. Next lecture, I started with
something fairly easy. That was till I was asked a question. A
question I had never read anywhere. A question I would have never
thought about, by myself. I went to the whiteboard in a daze and
attempted an answer. Convinced that I had figured it out correctly I
turned around to face my students, to find even more hands reaching up
into the air. This time, I came back feeling humbled and with a dent
on my self-esteem.
I never studied so much as a student, as I did before I went in for my
next lecture. All the questions forced me to navigate many tricky,
murky, dark-lit corners of the area I had not ventured into before. As
this became regular practice for each lecture, making slides and notes
began taking more and more time. Everything else that demanded my time
- my newly constructed marital jigsaw, the guerrilla warfare between my
unaccustomed body and the humid Mumbai weather, living out of a
suitcase - took a backseat. And I managed to hold on to a semblance of
a schedule in my lectures.
Till the first bundle of homework submissions landed on me. As I write
this, the first written homework has been submitted a second time by
most students, another written homework and a programming assignment
has been completed - all are still pending evaluation. In the interim,
a quiz has happened and the marks will go out in today's lecture. And
as I think that perhaps a better use of my time would have been to
finish correcting those assignments, I still continue to write this
article.
Not because I am compelled to write. Not even because this serves as
an escape from checking assignments (although it does). Instead it is
because I have made a startling discovery about myself. Something I
did not expect. Yes, it is a nerve-racking and intensely solitary
activity preparing for every lecture. It is turning out to be almost
dictatorial in its demands and ethereal in its rewards as a
profession. Obviously, being a fumbling amateur, I do not have a clue
about whether my students are actually falling in love with the
subject or not. Neither can I fathom how to teach them things like the
value of citations and references in a body of so called original
writing. And the only person who I am sure is learning a lot better
than what he or she would have, had I not been teaching, is me. Yet,
during a lecture, even the slightest hint of any kind of comprehension
on the face of any of my students seems to be enough to keep me coming
back for more!
Scary, isn't it?
An edited version of this article appears in the August-September 2009 issue of the IITB Campus Magazine, Raintree.
