Sunday, April 12, 2009

Of strings, kettledrums, imanusts, teachers, and learners


It was as if the gods had descended from the heavens (which gods, which heavens?) to mesmerize us with their music - and they took my pain away. Oh, what a week at the university which brings us a 32 million dollar basketball coach and an e-mail from the university president about no raises for the second year in a row. And this after nine weeks of too many things at work and lack of sleep – all of which I survived only because of generosity of all my friends. I have a lot jumbled in here after a long absence in the blog world - well, I have indeed spent my full semester’s worth of life and work in these nine weeks. [If this were on the Colbert Report tonight’s word segment, the panel on the right on would say “And what a pathetic life!”.]

The same week that brought us the above disasters also brought us Amitav Ghosh (my favorite favorite author), an excellent teacher’s workshop, and the santoor and tabla of Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain - not to mention my racquet grip and tennis footwork finally sync’ed-in using tips from the USTA web pages.

I tried to learn tabla from an uninspiring teacher in my school days (I then thought all teachers were supposed to be able to teach equally well), and you know how that ended. This week, a teaching workshop made me reflect on the magic of inspiring teachers. When I was not motivated, I was so screwed up that even a fun math teacher couldn’t get me to classes. [The panel on the right says, “other attractions of Bombay didn’t need that much traveling.”]

The math professor, however, was a lot of fun, and to this day I regret not going to his classes. In one of the few classes I happened to attend the professor explained the scientific phrase “for all practical purposes” like this: You have a boy and a girl on two sides of a classroom facing each other and, on each count, they would walk half the distance toward each other. There comes a time when the distance that theoretically remains between them doesn’t matter and they are there for all practical purposes! [Well, he said a step at a time, but saying half the distance makes the example more meaningful for teaching exponential functions and I can use the example to explain radioactive (age) dating – no pun intended.]

When I was finally motivated, even 300 student classes didn’t bother me (and I have had them from superstar and novice professors alike without different learning outcomes – and that’s because I was doing the work). The advice I always give to my students and friends’ kids is: if you sit in the first row, it is always like having a class to yourself – you really can’t tell there are 300 people behind you. [The right panel on Colbert’s Tonight’s Word: “He is deaf and blind.”]

It was exciting to tell Amitav how the Ibis has traveled through one of the biggest depressions in the shape of the Earth - the Indian geoid low of some 70 meters height. Ships are below the average Earth in that location. A mass deficiency (probably a developing hotspot) inside the Earth keeps this giant imanust (my made up word for the reverse of tsunami) entranced. Another curious fact of geophysics is that ships go up and down through this geoid depression in the ocean surface without expending any energy. He seemed fascinated by these tidbits. (Will the sequel to Sea of Poppies begin there?)

The brain can perform amazing things under hypnosis, and that’s what the two maestros did with their performance. Beat by beat, they restored clarity and perspective. (The “panel on the right” says, “… and his sleep hours.”).

And now on to all the piled up homework to make, homework and papers to grade, lectures to prepare, papers to review/edit, papers and proposal to write. Hopefully, tennis will be sufficient to help keep me on an even keel!