The Teaching Profession:

Teaching is my profession. It is providence more than volition that has found me embracing this profession. That said, many consider me as GOD in teaching and rightly so. For, when I teach nobody listens, just as it happens when GOD teaches. I guess that is where the similarity starts and, unfortunately, also ends.

Perhaps among teachers of my generation I can claim to have a fairly distinctive and an engaging style - not necessarily a better style than my colleagues, but one that has served me well. The reason being, I have tried to imitate two of the teachers who have most impressed me - Prof. C. Jagan Mohan Rao, my research supervisor, and Prof. Ramesh Sharma, who was a visiting lecturer during my Under Graduate days - if not in absolute content at least in my intent. So, in a mathematician's terms, my teaching style is unique upto an isomorphism!

My Objectives as a Teacher:

Though the different professions themselves cannot be categorised as mean or noble, Teaching perhaps is one of those rare professions wherein one can stay honest and with complete integrity, if one chooses to. An erudite speaker summed up the happenings in a classroom thus: "It is the ineffective and inefficient transfer of the immaterial and the irrelevant by the incompetent to the indifferent". Amen!

My Objectives as a teacher are based on the following simple poser: What should happen in a Class room? Teaching? - may be, a very noble thought. Finishing the prescribed syllabus? - That surely is more practical an approach. But is that all? The above are just necessary and not sufficient. My philosophy is "There should be Learning in the class room". Of course, I presuppose that a student's presence in my class is attributable more to his volition than to his fear of violation of some rules.

Class room is a place a teacher walks in to teach but comes out learned. I am always amazed at the fact that, at any given point of time, there are students who are more intelligent and sharp than the teacher himself.

The UGLY principle:

I make conscious effort in making my students UGLY. By that I mean, Understand, Grasp and Learn the Subject and Yearn for more. Though in the English Language the first three words may be substitutable, even synonymous, in the field of Mathematics one can safely consider them to be almost mutually exclusive. In the following, I make an attempt at this distinction, as I see it:

In short, while Understanding and Grasping may refer to the accumulation of Knowledge, Learning refers to enhancement of one's intelligence. In an age when the Society is fast moving from Knowledge-Based to Intelligence-Based and when Learning in the classroom is considered a bonus rather than the goal, the above philosophy is difficult to fault.

My Doctrine of Evaluation

A word about my style of evaluation. It is my strong belief that a student should be evaluated based on the following two ingredients:

So I make sure that the kind of tests I conduct - be it Oral or written - reflects the above doctrine and allows the student to reveal them both in his answers.

The Courses I have taught or still teach

Following are the courses I have either taught or still teaching. I hope to put up, in the near future, all the original resourses I use for both teaching and evaluation so that they can be obtained by following the links below :