I come from a family of teachers; I don’t mean it in the abstract sense. Like for instance my father, my sister, my grandfather (mom's father), many of my uncles and aunts are teachers or were teachers at some point of time. I guess love for teaching came naturally to me. My first experiments in teaching happened when I was a teenager. I ran an informal drawing and painting academy during summer and winter vacations to school going students when I was in high school. That experience of starting the painting classes at home helped me gain great confidence in becoming an entrepreneur and a teacher later in my life.
I did take up teaching when I was an engineering college student as well. I started a laboratory with my dad's help to train engineering students to conduct experiments in electronics(1). Succeeding in that effort prompted me to start an engineering start-up by name "Imagineering" just after completing my engineering education along with some of my friends. Fortunately or unfortunately it didn't take off well, but that did help me gain greater perspective on taking up entrepreneurship over the years. Coming back to the subject, I did take up short term teaching jobs during my masters as and when possible. Once I taught a computer programming language that helped me to pay off the money that I borrowed from my friends to do a three-week long trekking expedition at Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh (in July'08).
My long cherished dream was to teach at the University level, precisely to teach electronics to the engineering students. Nearly three years back (January '11) I was almost there to live it but it never worked out the way I thought it could have. Let me tell you why. After staying away from Bangalore for a few years, I came back to my place to pursue on another unfulfilled ambition of starting a business. I thought of taking up a part time teaching job in some engineering college as I thought I was good at it and in a way it could help me pay my bills until I established myself as a serious entrepreneur. For that purpose I prepared a neat resume and went around colleges in Bangalore looking out for a teaching position. Unfortunately none of the colleges were ready to offer me a part-time teaching position, but instead a few colleges offered me a full time position with a lucrative pay package. Since my primary interest was in setting-up my business I didn't take up any offer, however one of the reputed engineering college did offer me a part-time teaching position and almost confirmed it. I was very excited to start off but they kept me waiting for nearly two months in giving me the offer letter and later the principal of the college told me that I was too late for the semester. I was disappointed by the approach of that man for having such low professionalism while he was serving at such a high position. I should also say that I was little desperate, which made me feel even worse. Since things didn't work out in engineering colleges, I ended up taking an assignment of teaching computer science to apprentice fellows in a public sector company. In fact I had to explain nuance in programming languages and computer systems to the students in the local language, Kannada, as most folks there didn't understand English well. The irony is that I had always fared badly in computer science related subjects in my undergrad - anyway such is life! I was able to do that part time job, which I did enjoy as it progressed (and learnt a lot of things in computer science), for nearly six months before I decided to focus completely on my renewable energy start-up (August '11). (2)
The business I started took off well, I got great people to work with and we also got the technology funding from a reputed multi-national company that gave us the access to advanced engineering tools for building our products and systems. I must say things worked better than what I had aspired. We had our ups and downs but fortunately nothing too adverse came our way, as we weren't doing some random stuff nor doing things at an unreasonable pace. During this course of time, we happen to get an opportunity to provide engineering solutions to an agricultural research in connection to renewable energy and water management. The project was supposed to be executed in an old and reputed engineering college which was established even before India got Independence. During the near end of that project I once again got all romantic about teaching as I was in an academic environment. I also wanted to make little more money to accommodate some extra spending and also pay off some personal loans. The other possible benefit was that I could get interns to my company straight from my class. Once I expressed my interest towards teaching to my customer (the professor from the college), he connected me to the evening college principal of the same engineering college. The evening college principal, a kind man with genuine interest towards academics, has also been the head of the department (HOD) of Electrical and Electronics Engineering(EEE) department of the Day College. He requested me to teach to the Day College students as a couple of his female colleagues from Day College had taken maternity leave. He was fine with me taking classes at the time that was convenient to me. Well, that's how I got my real break to teach at the university level.
Since I come from an electronics engineering background I was given Digital Electronics, core electronics subject, to the second year EEE students rather than an electrical subject. I was super glad to take the subject as it was one of my favorite subjects during my engineering days. That excitement for teaching engineering re-affirmed that my love for engineering had not reduced ever since I took up engineering education; as a matter of fact I was taking the subject eleven years after I studied the same subject at the college. I wanted to do a good job and wanted to do it exactly the way I wanted my teachers to do it when I was a student. Some of my teachers had done incredible job as teachers, whos work I still derive inspiration(3). I didn’t want to exactly teach but to setup up a mechanism for learning. I wanted to make myself progressively redundant in the process. I wanted the students to learn engineering to make world a better place. All my idealistic thoughts, which otherwise won’t find much vent flowed in my mind and heart when I got this job. I was happier than getting any job in the past.
My class comprised of about forty students. Since the college is amongst the top colleges in the city the students who joined it were also fairly meritorious candidates. They responded pretty well to some of my experiments in teaching. Like for instance, I avoided solving a problem on the board myself once I had taught a concept with an example, instead I used to ask the students to solve the problem on their note books and later randomly invited students to solve it on the board. Once the problem was solved by a student I used to ask if someone wished to contest for an alternate solution. Greater participation of the students led to further investigation and better understanding of the problem to the students who were not able to solve on their own. While trying all the experiments I started understanding how student’s minds work. I figured out that they weren’t accustomed to many of the ways I was trying in the class but still they welcomed, especially when I told them that talking to their neighbors in the class could be a faster way to learn for some if they cared to keep it low and not disturb the students who wished to learn by listening to my explanation alone. I experimented my ideas in giving the test question paper level as well. In the first test I gave a paper with one very application intensive question with many assumption the student had to make to solve the problem and another set of questions which were straight forward. The catch was that I gave them the choice to solve either the tough question that would account for forty marks or easy set of questions that would account for thirty marks and told them that in real life we seldom get equal choices and corresponding benefits associated to it. Though that question paper(4) became a matter of discussion and also debate in the whole department and perhaps the college but never the less I did attract many likeminded people towards me. The most fascinating thing as a teacher and as someone who once had an aspiration for a career in fine art is using colored chalks in the class. I greatly enjoyed using the full board space to draw various circuits, waveforms and tables using multi colored chalks that really gave higher sense of understanding of the subject(5). In all my teaching jobs I've kept my approach similar as in, when I was a student I always hoped for love and kindness from my teachers, which I thought would extinguish all kinds of fear and in way leads to greater learning; Well, in my class I ensured that no student was in any kind of fear and many a times I did build a great deal of harmony by encouraging situational humor to wipe off the barrier between the student and the teacher.
The semester got over last week and I’m fairly satisfied by the way I did my job. I’m thrilled by looking at generous feedback my students have given in the faculty feedback survey(6). I have to figure out ways to improve in some departments of teaching like the presentation skills and keeping the class discipline better, which is something I’ll focus during my next teaching assignment. I’m also very happy that many of my students want to do internship in my company as they loved the application based problems that were solved in the class and also got excited about the agricultural research project that we have done as part of my company in the college. At this point of time I’m in complete awe about the way things have fallen in place, favoring me to really live this dream of being an educator and an entrepreneur that I always wanted to be.
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(1) The lab tuition poster - Year 2004:
(2) My company website:
(3)The Toastmaster's speech that I gave when I was with GE Aviation on three influential teachers.
(4) The first test question paper:
(5)Pictures of the board taken by my students after the class:
https://picasaweb.google.com/106423175487235708924/20131130
(6) Faculty feedback survey form:
https://goo.gl/photos/HU6c8PyjBCcSfUhn6
(6) Faculty feedback survey form:
https://goo.gl/photos/HU6c8PyjBCcSfUhn6
