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.