Tag: papers

Business school all over again

This morning, I felt like I was in business school all over again.

So the Montessori school that my daughter goes to is exploring the possibility of introducing an adolescent (12-18 age group) program that follows the Montessori philosophy. Towards this end, they are having a series of “seminars” with parents to explain the methodology and collect feedback.

Before the first such “seminar” two months ago, they had sent us all a paper written by Dr. Maria Montessori and asked us to read it in preparation. When we walked in to school, we were all given copies of the same paper and asked to read it before the discussions started. The teachers walked in after having given all of us to read through the paper once again.  “This sounds like Amazon”, I had thought.

To give parents full flavour of the proposed program, we were told that these sessions mirror what the adolescent version of the school is supposed to be like. Each session involves discussion of a piece of written text. All participants are supposed to have read it beforehand. And discussions have to be on point to the reading – like every note of participation has to refer to a particular page and paragraph. I had come away from the first session thinking “these guys seem to be trying to recreate business school in high school”.

And then, this morning, at the second such session, I got a taste of this medicine as well. I’ve had two insanely productive days at work last two days, which has meant that evenings I’ve been rather tired and unable to really read the paper (once again it was a paper by Dr. Montessori). This morning, I woke up late and by the time I got to school for the session (that began at 8am), I’d barely managed to glance through the paper.

I furiously tried to read it before the teachers came in, and barely managed a fourth. The teachers reminded us of the rules – all discussing points had to refer to specific parts of the paper, and we couldn’t talk “generally” (ruling out any “arbit class participation”). Also, the teachers would not “lead” the discussion – the format of the class was such that it was peer discussion.

I’m speculating here, but it is possible that many other parents this morning were also in my state – having turned up to class having not read the prescribed reading. Initially the CP was slow and deliberate. That we had to reply to each other (and keep referring to the text as we did so) made it slower. There were a few awkward pauses which I tried to use to hurriedly read the rest of the paper. I was also getting distracted, planning this blogpost in my head. I was also simultaneously feeling horrible about not having come to the session prepared, and was thinking I’m a horrible parent.

The format of the discussion helped, though, as different people kept referring to different sections of the paper, and I sort of read through it in a non-linear fashion. In about ten minutes, in the course of the discussion I had probably read through the entire text. And then I started unleashing.

All those business school skills came of good use – despite the constrained format, I somehow winged through today’s session (not that that was the intended consequence). By the end of the session I had comfortably spoken the most in the group. Old habits die hard, I guess.

It weirdly felt like I was business school once again. And as it happened, I noticed that the person next to me was wearing an IIMB T-shirt (though he didn’t put too much CP)!

On a more serious note, maybe this kind of a schooling format in high school might mean that the children may not really need to go to college!

Teaching and research

My mind goes back to a debate organised by the Civil Engineering department at IIT Madras back in the early 2000s. A bunch of students argued that IIT Madras was “not a world class institution”. A bunch of professors argued otherwise.

I don’t remember too much of the debate but I remember one line that one of the students said. “How does one become a professor at IIT Madras? By writing a hundred papers. Whether one can teach is immaterial”.

The issue of an academic’s responsibilities has been a long-standing one. One accusation against the IITs (ironical in the context of the bit of debate I’ve quoted above) is that they’re too focussed on undergraduate teaching and not enough on research – despite only hiring PhDs as faculty. From time to time the Indian government issues diktats on minimum hours that a professor must teach, and each time it is met with disapproval from the professors.

The reason this debate on an academic’s ability to teach came to my mind is because I’ve been trying to read some books and papers recently (such as this one), and they’re mostly unreadable.

They start with some basic introductory statements and before you know it you are caught up in a slew of jargon and symbols and greeks. Basically for anyone who’s not an insider in the field, this represents a near-insurmountable barrier to learning.

And this is where undergraduate teaching comes in. By definition, undergrads are non-specialists and not insiders in any particular specialisation. Even if they were to partly specialise (such as in a branch of engineering), the degree of specialisation is far less than that of a professor.

Thus, in order to communicate effectively with the undergrad, the professor needs to change the way he communicates. Get rid of the jargon and the sudden introduction of greeks and introduce subjects in a more gentle manner. Of course plenty of professors simply fail to do that, but if the university has a good feedback mechanism in place this won’t last.

And once the professor is used to communicating to undergrads, communicating with the wider world becomes a breeze, since the same formula works. And that vastly improves the impact of their work, since so many more people can now follow it.