Twenty years on...Lessons from IIMB

You know what Galbraith said about academics Professor Vaidyanathan asked me as he welcomed me into IIMB as a colleague.  "In industry people kill each other over billions of dollars.  In academia we fight over dollars and cents." He had been my teacher twenty years earlier.  

In the years that followed at IIMB I would often recall those welcoming lines.  The causeway of sorts connecting the faculty lounge to a sit out across the corridor where he spoke those lines was the location of many memorable conversations, some pleasant and some not so pleasant, in the years that followed.

IIMB taught me many a valuable lesson. 

The position of the teacher in today's classroom

I thought of writing this post in the backdrop of a recent flurry of activity on my Linkedin account which I have since discontinued.  I shut the account down as part of my process of winding down my networked existence and retreating into a life of greater solitude.

Not that I sat in the middle of a massive network with several thousand people following me.  When I shut the account down I just had some 1700 people in my network at the end of more than a full decade of being a member of the network.

The flow of messages, posts, comments and replies to comments was triggered by my response to a message.  My response essentially stated that I had a poster in my office that stared down at me every time I looked up from my desk.  The poster simply said:  You are a lousy teacher.

The poster is a Word print out that I have made.  Similar to a couple of other posters I have that have messages that I wish to be reminded of, this one too is meant to remind me of how I am as a teacher.  Before I leave my desk for a class, I look at the poster for a few seconds, take a deep breath and remind myself of many shortcomings as a teacher and utter a silent prayer to the Lord to help me get better as a teacher.

The prayer does not seem to have helped me improve.  Instead it helps me by merely reminding me to acknowledge that all that I could do is to merely try.  Much of prayer is meant to do that I think -   although there have been the occasional miracles in my life that I believe may have been answers to my prayers.

The mention of the poster set off a few responses from my former students who are in my Linkedin account who generously protested and said many things about how in their opinion I was a good teacher.  The fact is that they are the exceptions among the hundreds of students that have sat in my class, the vast majority of whom have a different opinion, quite likely diametrically opposite to those of the kind-hearted minority.

In general the majority of students influences popular perceptions of one as a teacher. To make matters more interesting in my case that majority does not have a homogeneous opinion about me.  It ranges from indifference towards my performance as a teacher, to downright anger for a variety of reasons.  

Between these two ends of the spectrum the numerical score that informs public opinion about me as a teacher usually takes a nosedive.  If I am extraordinarily lucky the rating hovers around the mean for the cohort of teachers in that term leaving me like the "living dead" or sideways deal in a venture investor's portfolio.

The reason I have that poster is to remind myself that, in terms of the feedback, at the end of eighteen years of teaching, I am nowhere close to being a star.

In my early years, at the end of every course I would open the feedback with as much trepidation as those students of mine who were hoping not to fail my course even though they realised there was a high chance they might.  The feedback sheet would leave me utterly humbled when I opened it.  

Then I would  read the comments section in the feedback.  That is even more humbling.  There would be comments about my monotone voice, my lack of humour, the long and convoluted English sentences I spoke and so on.  There would be comments about my not having used enough illustrations, having spent too much time on theory and so on.  

There would also be the occasional ones that would make me laugh at myself in a tragicomic way.  There was for example one comment that said I shouted in the class that they could almost see smoke coming out of my ears.  There was another one about how my blue shirt and black trouser that I wore in every class made them wonder if I ever washed my clothes.

The more charitable ones among the angry would concede an element of doubt that may be I knew the subject but I did not do a good job of explaining it.  The less charitable ones would pronounce that I did not know the subject and that I should not be permitted to teach.

The moment of crowning glory was when a student published a book on campus life in IIMB in which he said that I had single handedly destroyed his interest in finance.  When I read that I realised why I had seen him right at the last desk, with an impassive look throughout the course.

All of that are not the main reasons that one considers oneself a lousy teacher.  The more important reason that the feedback matters is that in many institutions the teaching feedback has a large role to play in the career development of a teacher in the modern education system.  

Which is why my 19 year old nephew, who is a student of science in a leading institution of eminence in science education in Bangalore, recently told me one day how he had done a good deed by giving a high rating to a terrible teacher who had appealed to the class for a generous rating on the last day of his course.

It is not so much what the students think of one as a teacher that defines one's happiness or satisfaction. It is the opinion that the people who matter in the institution form about one as a teacher, based on what the students believe or reflect in the feedback form.

That makes for a depressing realisation every time one finishes teaching a course.  Like the proverbial experimental monkey that avoids touching the bananas that give an electric shock one stops opening the feedback form.  Instead one waits to hear the unexciting news when the leadership team of the institution delivers the bad news about the feedback for some official reason or the other.

Dont get me wrong.  I am not against teacher ratings.  The only academic experience I have is of teaching in one single business school all my life, which is among India's best and most competitive.  Students struggle to get in there.  They pay an awful lot of money to be educated.  It is but fair if they expect that the teachers they learn from perform well.  (Apologies for the intended pun in the verb.)  Those that do not measure need to pull up their socks.  And those that cannot need to rethink their options.

Does that mean teacher ratings should matter less where education is more affordable?  I do not know.  I am reminded of my conversation with my landlord as I was about to join the place where I teach now.  He was a professor of physics at IIT Delhi.  He said to me as I returned the keys to the house, "So welcome to the noble profession."  I replied to him that I would be teaching in a business school, not in a college of science, humanities or arts, unlike him.  He asked me how it differed.  I could not articulate my response back then.  With nearly two decades of teaching experience, if I were to meet him today I would say to him that I see myself more as a service provider of sorts, than the teacher in a traditional sense.   The price of education it appears has a bearing on what is expected of the educator.

Every time I look at the poster in my office, just as it reminds me of the long path I still have to travel to evolve as a teacher, an even more powerful feeling of guilt engulfs me.  More than forty years ago as a fiery student leader I accosted Dr Michael, my Physics teacher.  I said to him that he was not discharging his duty as a teacher by not covering the portions on time.  That academic year my college had worked for 40 days, thanks to frequent student unrest, often for no good reason.

Dr Michael was a soft spoken, kind hearted gentleman and a good teacher too.  I could see the embarassment and sadness on his face as I levelled that unkind charge.  With genuine remorse he said to me and the other the students who had gathered around: I have failed you all as teacher.  I will request the Head of the Department to find a better teacher for you for the rest of the course.  

We never saw him again in our class.

This was in a government college.  The fees we paid was a pittance.  Yet I had displayed an unbecoming sense of entitlement. 

I have stopped looking at my feedback form in the past seven or eight years. Yet year on year there is one particular occasion where my feedback for the courses I taught during that year stares at me for a brief while, no matter if I wish to see it or not.  My heart sinks unfailingly at that moment when I have to see my ratings.  I think of the poster in my office.  And then I am reminded of Dr.  Michael.  I ask myself if my annual angst is karma or nemesis at work.  

No matter what it is, I silently ask Dr. Michael for forgiveness.  For, today as a teacher who experiences the pain of unflattering ratings from my students I realise how Dr. Michael must have felt the day my classmates and I had attacked him, in spite of all the effort he had put in to cover portions in the few days that the college was allowed to function by my agitating comrades and their unscrupulous political masters.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Twenty Years On...

It was twenty years ago to this day that I drove into IIMB to start a new phase in my life.  It was not just the start of a new career.  

It was Kannada Rajyotsava day.  As my black ambassador, as old as myself back then, rolled through the streets of the campus, directionlessly because I did not know the way, it may have been a curious sight to the few residents who may have been looking at the streets.  

Cars were relatively few on the campus in those days.  Television had invaded the Indian home deeply enough by then, which meant that there were not too many of them looking out at the street.

Twenty years is a long time in any one's life.  It has been a third of my life in this world and close to half of all the years that I have worked.   Yet it has flown by so quickly that it does not feel that long.  I have to think of the many things that have happened in my life and in that of people close to me to get a sense of how long it has been.

This has been the longest I have worked in a single institution or organisation all my life.  It has also been the longest spell with few transitions in terms of level or positions.  Academe in any case does not have too many levels.  It is relatively flat in terms of hierarchy.  What it lacks in terms of hierarchy it makes up for in terms of a finely stacked intellectual pecking order.   

Academic journals and citations allow you to draw up that pecking order. It starts with the name of the  journal.  And there is the question of whether you solo or co-authored. And if that was not sufficient there is the question of whether you are first named among the list of co-authors, whether you are the corresponding author or not.  There is a similar elaborate set of measures that help calibrate citations.  Not all citations are equally valuable.

So on that pleasant evening, as dusk was falling on the quiet campus, barring the shouts of children savouring the last minutes of play for the evening, we finally found that place that was tucked away on a short street, where a few residences sat together in a small pocket of sorts.  

My wife, my Dad and I set foot in that place, right foot first in true South Indian tradition, with the Lord's name on our lips, into what would be our home for the next twelve years.  The place where we would go through many moments of joy, anxiety, expectations, disappointment, envy, smugness and every other shade of emotion that makes up this kaleidoscope that human life is.

Looking back, I feel I had strayed into academia, quite like an innocent child wanders into an interesting place, not knowing what to expect or how to deal with it.  I had somehow developed a fancy for an academic life.  And I was lucky enough to find an open door to walk in through.  Or, was I?

I had nursed the desire over many years.  Throughout that process I had no inkling of what it meant to be an academician.  I had no idea of what academics did.  How they spent their average working day.  What made them tick, to borrow a metaphor from the organisational behaviour.  How did they measure success? 

I would be on a never ending quest to figure out answers to these questions through the years that were to follow at IIMB.  Twenty years on I continue to seek those answers.  Some answers came in the form of happy discoveries.  Some as harsh realisations, by which time it was too late to set the clock back. 

That is the strange thing about life.  Happy moments are like a fix.  You do not ask yourself how you landed there.  You just savour the moment, expecting that it will be there forever.  The sad and the harsh ones are like the day after the hallucination has worn off.  Makes you want to run away.  To roll the clock back to those halcyon moments that just passed by.  To ask yourself how did you let yourself into this dull post-high ache.

Twenty years on, as I write this post now, I am in that post-high moment of asking myself how I landed myself where I am.  In perhaps a not so appropriate analogy I feel like the character that Gene Wilder plays in the movie Woman In Red.  (You can read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_Red_(1984_film).

Academia to me was the like the Woman in Red.  I knew nothing about it.  But I somehow was smitten enough to think it held the keys to my kingdom of fulfillment.  Before I realised it I had jumped through several hoops, transformed almost entirely the man I had been and travelled a long way towards my object of desire.  

And here I was perched perilously on a window sill, embarrassingly clothed, running the risk of falling off to a hopeless, messy, end several dozen feet below.  As I stood there, not having attained the object of my desire, like Gene Wilder, I could not help wondering:  Just a few days ago I was a happily married man with a wife and children.  How did I land here now? 

The Gene Wilder analogy is humorous exaggeration.  An one sided account of my life as someone forever aspiring to be an academician and never attaining that goal.  It has not been all as hopeless as the story of Gene Wilder in that movie though.  

There have been the happy, bright interludes.  They have all been on the personal side though, by God's grace.  What one lost in the swings one sort of made up on the roundabouts, to borrow a favourite metaphor of Wodehouse.

There is much more to say about these years at IIMB.  Lots more.  But I have to stop now.  With a class to teach in a few hours from now I have miles to go before I sleep, to steal a line from Robert Frost. 

Nanni...Namaskaaram...