Teachers Learn from Students

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Padmabhushan Ramachandra Guha called the 1950s an "innocent decade". 

He knows nothing about it...his knowledge is hearsay...he is 15 years younger to me :)

In the early 1950s while I was a student of our High School in the seaside village, Muthukur, our teachers were truly innocent. Most of them were not well off, born and brought up in Muthukur itself, and managed to become teachers there. 

Their students were not that innocent. There were these brothers Venu and Raja, the sons of the richest landlord of the village. And they used to regularly visit the nearby town Nellore on weekends in their family tractor and learn a lot.

And they brought Kommuri Sambasiva Rao's collection of Detective Story Books and circulated them amongst us. And we used to hide them in our geography tomes and read them in the boring class room.

Our teachers espied and walloped us and confiscated the books (and circulated them among themselves, learning a lot).

One day Venu brought a cheap edition of "Kokkoka Sastram" (కొక్కోక శాస్త్రం)  with voluptuous rudimentary drawings in them and was caught reading it. Since he was the son of the local landlord, he escaped punishment, but that book was confiscated by our Hindi Pundit (and all his colleagues must have learned various new techniques).

[If you type that word 'kokkoka' in Google, the top entry will give you this message:

[Mature content warning   You have reached age restricted area.

Continue Browsing other books. Or If you are above 18 years old and you are socially, culturally, legally allowed to read such material then I understood and want to continue Or Leave this page.]

Another day, Raja was found sitting in the last bench wearing a totally unfamiliar set of jet black 'cooling' glasses (to ogle at the lone girl in the front bench). His glasses were confiscated by our math teacher; and they must have been a revelation to his colleagues.

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Most of our teachers at our university in the 1960s were not that smart. They were proud and standoffish and never mixed with us students...scared that we would ask them questions which they couldn't answer...they, having read no physics books during their past two decades other than their class notes taken down when they were students.

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And then I reached IIT KGP as a young teacher. And I was smarter; as I said the other day I learned lots and lots from my students there:

https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2021/02/guru-parampara-1.html

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One late evening I was working in the Guest Room of my PhD Guide Prof SDM's Qrs while he was typing out the manuscript of his paper on his favorite Portable Remington typewriter in the Hall.

...And he stopped typing and sent for me.

And he said:

"Shastri! I am not getting the right words to say what I want to say in this para"

I knew nothing about the Group Theory on which he was working...I was into Electrodynamics. So I said:

"Sir! Please tell me what you want to say"

And he fell silent, thought for a couple of minutes, cleared his throat, and spelled it out.

And then I said:

"Please hear what I have to say and type it out if it pleases you"

And he kept quiet and typed out what I said. 

And examined it and laughed:

"But this is precisely what I told you. Thank you! Discussions with you have always been fruitful"

See...innocent students can also serve as "sounding boards" if the teacher really wants to learn...

It is said that, after drafting his famous speeches, Churchill used to go to his stable and address his horses (before addressing the donkeys in his Parliament)

:)

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Listen to our Nobel Laureate Feynman:

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do to me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

.....

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specifically selected for their tremendous brains and were now given the opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. 

Nothing happens because there's not enough challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from students. Nothing!

[He was talking of Einstein]

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One late night in 1999, I was coaching my son and his close friend in the Guest Room of our Qrs at IIT KGP, for JEE. 

And I picked up a standard  problem in Circuits from Resnick & Halliday and asked them to solve it by the method I explained.

And I found my son dozing in his chair...gurr...

And I poked him in his ribs. 

And he woke up with a start and, to cover up, he asked me, poking his finger in a random branch of the circuit diagram:

"What happens if I insert another inductor here?"

I gave him some answer on the spot but wasn't happy with it.

That problem took all of 6 months to solve and resulted in a publication in the journal "Physics Education" with all of 4 authors, my son very much in the list.

For, he who poses a good question is greater than the one who answers it.

Golden Rule of Publication!

Bhrigu asked a famous question to his father Varuna; and got this famous answer (Taittareeya Upanishad):

यतो वा इमानि भूतानि जायन्ते येन जातानि जीवन्ति य
त्प्रयन्त्यभिसंविशन्ति तद्विजिज्ञासस्व तद्ब्रह्मेति

That, verily, from which these beings are born, That, by which when born they live, That unto which, when departing they enter. That seek to know. That is Brahman. 

https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2021/02/boomerangs.html

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Acknowledgment: I thank Shri Kandi Shankarayya Garu for giving me the topic of this blog:

See the Golden Rule above :)

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