Unfair advantage?

This is another interesting incident during the seventies. There was a student in the M.Sc.Tech class who was very intelligent and innovative and equally irregular and lazy. He almost always wrote what is necessary for a pass in the exams... Not more, not less.. Well, just a little bit more to guard against ant misfortune. Sometimes that little extra got him more marks and there were occasions when he stood first in the class ,specially when the paper was difficult and others could not get many marks. This happened more times in my subject, may be because he was more interested in the subject or may be because I admire innovative answers.
One day I got an anonymous letter from one of the students claiming that this boy was getting early information about the question paper. I was more amused than annoyed since my papers were always set minutes before the test and even I did not know beforehand, I AM very intuitive by nature.
So next time the test was due, I announced in the class that I got such a letter and I know who wrote it( I did, after all I usually collect info about ALL students) I am not bothered. Anyway since there is such a feeling, I do not want anyone to think somebody got a unfair advantage and I am giving all of them the advantage by disclosing the paper on a friday and holding the test on monday.
I am sure you can imagine what happened in that test.

Satisfaction

About ten days back I received a request from a student of the M.Sc. Teck class, Isaac Paul, for an endorsement on linked in. I simply wrote whatever came to me on tne spur of the moment, because I distinctly  remember him and almost every one in his batch,though it is decades since I saw him. He does have a very successful career ,starting in HPCL and then moving to the middle east.So I was surprised to receive a mail from him the next day. He said he never felt so proud in his whole life! He MUST have had many proud moments. If a few lines from me could make him proud, well I am overwhelmed. I knew of many students of mine who told their brothers, sisters, cousins, friends to join in applied physics/ instrumentation so that they can be my students, but this beats all of them, except one. One student who was a well known professor in Switzerland at that time wrote to me that till  that day he starts his course on thin films in the exact words with which I did when teaching his class.
A satisfying life, indeed.

A teachers memoirs

My teaching career is full of interesting experiences. I wont boast that I am a good teacher but I certainly tried to be one. Teaching was to me never a profession but always a vocation. I never tended to look upon the students as a number in the class. They were human beings,period. A class was at all times an interaction with human beings for me. It may not be obvious but I made concious efforts to know some thing about the back ground of each student, his likes and dislikes, his interests and so on. I planned how I go about teaching the class coming next.. What questions to ask, whom to ask, how he is likely to respond, and how I am going to tackle it. I planned the lay out of what I am going to display on the black board and things like that. Since my preparation for each class was centered on the students in that class and the topic to be covered, I never felt any monotony in teaching the same subject year after year.. The students would naturally change and so would my approach.. So every class is a new experience.

anna annannaa

media which boosted annas group without bothering about their credentials got mud on its face.giving news is their duty but round the clock live IS something uncalled for.

MY EYES SEE WHAT I WANT

Anybody's world revolves round his persona. If the external world does not suit me I say the world has changed. but is it not my perception that changed.
Several things stand out as examples of this.
We are always tempted to say that the cricketers of the present day are nothing compared to the older ones who played when I am a school boy or in college. But if one pauses for a second we realise that the statistics speak for themselves. If the batsman scored more runs, of course they never faced fielding of the level seen quite often today. If the bowlers were threats, their bowling was never subject to videography and analysis as at present.
We also compare music of today with that of yore. but the present day youngsters are swayed by it as much as we were by the older singers. May be I or you do not like it but that does not make it BAD!