Fourteen years of teaching

I attended a lecture by one of the eminent professors at one of the premier B-schools in the country some time ago. As I sat there listening to the person read from power-point slides I remembered once again how much drudgery it was to attend 6 years of lectures through undergrad and graduate education in India.

We have all lamented the lack of good teachers in the country. One of the causal parameters is the low pay accorded to the teaching profession. Second is perhaps that fact that bright driven people are not attracted to teaching - hence the old adage, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Even if we were to magically solve these two problems - paying the best people the equivalent of what they could earn out there in the commercial world and attracting these people back to academia to teach - how do we identify the people who can actually make a difference to students' lives.

I have been thinking about this for some time now and I have even shared these thoughts with people who will listen. Three things need to come together in a person for him or her to be a great teacher.

1. Knowledge about the subject. You cannot teach what you do not know.

2. Communication skills to effectively transfer that knowledge to the students. We have all met teachers, perhaps in our undergrad years where we sat through a lecture of arcane gobbledygook and understood just two things. One, this is difficult stuff. Two, the professor seems to have understood it.

3. The ability to engage the audience. I have always learned best when I was having fun and I was having fun when the teacher managed to engage me in the discussion. I remember two instances distinctly. The first was when I was in 6th grade and our history teacher used to make the classes come alive. We could see those battles unfold before our eyes. Our eyes filled with tears when she walked us through Jallianwala Bagh and our heart swelled with pride at the uprightness of our freedom fighters. The second was more recent, when I attended a 4 day management training program by one of the top ten rated B-school professors in the world. This person made the learning come out of the class participation.

As I sat there I finally realized what B-school education could be like, should be like, and how we are perhaps wasting two years of the prime-est of the primes of the lives of the best minds in the country when we have them attend classes where the professors drone on about something while the students minds zoned out.

Those of who were relatively lucky in school and undergrad often met teachers who possessed two of the three traits. Some had knowledge about the subject and also had the communication skills to transfer the knowledge. These were the respected professors. We did not quite enjoy sitting in their classes, but those with ambition felt a sense of duty that caused them to ay attention in these lectures.

Other teachers were a lot of fun. They cracked jokes and told stories. But there was no meat, no real substance to the content. These sessions were not really education. They were entertainment.

And yet others, admittedly a rare breed, had knowledge about the subject and they also engaged the audience. But strangely, the transfer of knowledge was not happening. Perhaps they invested more time and effort in trying to awe the students about their knowledge. These sessions were not education either. They were a form of satsang. 

It seems that in Indian academia, while some of professors have the knowledge and a somewhat smaller number have the communication skills to transfer that knowledge, almost none have that elusive quality - the ability to engage the students. The sad part is that is that most of them are not even willing to acknowledge the importance of engagement.