On Teaching and Teachers

Happy holidays everyone! I hadn’t updated my blog in over 10 months and figured it was time to write one. My hectic schedule of juggling a job, PhD and other miscellaneous activities have kept me quite busy.

Today I wanted to touch upon the topic of teaching and teachers. There are teachers and then there are Teachers. I’ve had the privillege to study under some of the best teachers that India has over various stages of my education. This post focuses on two particularly great teachers; Sanjiva Prasad and Akshay S. Being knowledgeable and experienced alone doesn’t make a good teacher, it’s the ability to transfer it and the effectiveness of the approach are also equally important. I have studied COL765(Logic and Functional Programming) under Sanjiva and COL869(Special topics in Concurrency and Parallel Programming) under Akshay. There’s no question about the depth of their knowledge in their fields of expertise; it’s their method of teaching that cannot be more different.

The differences in their method of teaching is what I found very surprising especially given that both the subjects were very mathematical in nature. Sanjiva plans his lectures with broader brush strokes while Akshay plans things down to the smallest detail including the time to be spent on an example. Sanjiva’s approach gives one an understanding of grand scheme of things from definitions, which is expected in functional programming, while Akshay primarily teaches by example.

Sanjiva assumes that the audience is as smart as him(which is a hard feat considering his intellect) or that they work out the details afterwards and approach him for further clarification. His sentences are exact, meaning any word additions makes them redundant. A mere passing remark on corollary of a theorem is a hint towards the missing piece in the puzzle for the next part or better yet: the exact idea to solve his tests. This keeps you on your toes, weighing on his every word and has a lasting impact on you for quite sometime even after the lecture. His test papers are intriguing to say the least, the answers/hints to some questions are given out already in previous questions; perhaps testing whether you are smart enough to find his cheeky humour. I still remember with a certain fondness, the question on proof of “currying”, where the necessary functions were already given in the previous bits.

Akshay on the otherhand assumes no foundation and builds them from the ground up, pausing on every detail and the “gotchas”. Perhaps due to the size of the class(about 10 people), the lecture often turns into a discussion and is not at all intimidating. His proofs have a WYSIWYG style(what you see is what you get), no missing pieces and it never gets heady. His tests are equally entertaining, where you “extend” the ideas learnt in class to new models beyond the ones taught.

It was a pleasure studying under both of them. If I had to summarize both their teaching styles in one sentence, Sanjiva’s style is a wild, exhilarating horse ride where even a momentary lapse means you are lost in the jungle of information while Akshay’s style is similar to a well-prepared carnatic concert where you sit back and revel in the beauty of math. Personally, I like my mornings filled with Sanjiva’s and afternoons with Akshay’s. Here’s a picture of all of us to close out!