Colours of Teaching !

Chose to blog in the midnight.  When the neurons are overloaded with many tasks that are  lined up in to-do list, they get noisy and wake you up in the middle of the sleep.  With those tired neurons, its better not to attempt those research or academic tasks as it will lessen the quality. Its better to choose one of those lighter tasks which are liked by the arteries much and that’s y I am here in my tiny world. Maybe I am finding reasons to blog :) 

 Teaching has so many colours. Apart from academic and research there is one more dimension, that is called, “faculty advisor”. A counsellor kind of responsibility where we will be assigned with 70 students right from their first year and we have to take care of their performances, report to their parents in case of any deviations, issue hall tickets, grade sheets forward important messages etc till their final year. In my first year at SRM, I was not assigned with this responsibility but in my second year, I was assigned with this. Initially, I totally hated it as you always need to be on WhatsApp and you always need to attend calls from students and also sometimes from their parents.  On the first day of this responsibility, I had put my phone on silent as I was in some meeting and I was shocked to have received around 100 missed calls, as the students were trying to contact to submit their details right after their admission. Found very hard to manage this one along with the already existing academic and research responsibilities.

As days passed on, found ways to settle down things, got used to tackle and now my students are in their third year. Started liking this one soon.  You tend to see different types of students and different types of parents.  It feels so happy when parents send wishes on New year and Diwali.  Sometimes, it feels so heavy to hear their pain and it gives immense happiness when we try to bring solutions. This responsibility taught me to see the students not only as a teacher but also as a parent!  This generation’s biggest problem is that they don’t have any problems. Anything could give  them stress and they  in turn cause stress to  their parents and they get baffled  and worried staying too far from them.  This responsibility has also taught me how to bring up my own kid and correct my mistakes now itself! But the good news is that most of the students are highly responsible. They know what they want and what to do right from their first year.

I think the post is getting so heavy, let me try to lighten it. I remember all of my student names. Sometimes I may not relate to their faces correctly. One student came to me recently to submit his course enrollment form. My section is H-alpha and yes we have k sections and each alphabet has alpha and beta. Around 1000 students get admitted every year in CSE! :) . Coming back to that student, his face looked unfamiliar to me. I asked him do you belong to H-alpha? Soon I had the feeling of dejavu. I felt I have asked this question earlier. I also asked him, “Have I asked this question  earlier?” He said. “Yes mam, you have asked me three times so far and he smiled!” Felt so embarrassing and guilty towards the kid. I somehow wanted to convince him, “I said I think you are a good student and I have not  dealt with any deviation issues of yours so far and that’s y I don’t remember you ”.  He also wanted to bring me out of my embarrassment. He said, “ Mam I did not get a chance to study  subjects  under you”. Students in SRM opt teachers during online teachers-polling, during when they select their favorite teachers for their subjects. But when a particular teacher reaches his/her total students capacity, then they can’t choose that teacher and they have to look for another teacher.  He said, “every time I wanted to select you, your name gets vanished from the list within 10 seconds!”. These kind of feedback gives more pressure to me than happiness. I do feel happy but these days, I am feeling a lot of pressure to match up their  hopes. I cross check my understanding for even a silly topic with many websites and get tensed and finally I give a big knock on my head and tell myself, “cool down and go to class!”.  Of course, this is making me as a better teacher as I am trying to explore in many dimensions even for the subjects, I  have handled few times earlier and we have to do this as technology gets updated and we can’t stay outdated! The way, I taught “Natural Language processing (NLP)” in 2015 can’t be followed now as many advancements have happened. This time planning to show demo of each topic. Thanks to the  Online platforms like text-processing.com, regexer.com and Kaggle which helps to show the demos of almost all topics making NLP more interesting! Thanks to the Youtube lectures by Stanford Professors whose ideas, I mostly follow as they get updated as the technology advances! and importantly when SRM students are highly advanced and updated there is no way of staying behind and thanks to them too :) Hoping to become even better and update myself whenever the technology gets updated!

And yeah, hope I also learn many things out of the responsibilities given to me apart from teaching and research, so that one day, even I will be ready to call myself as a good teacher! I think that  will happen only on my last day as a teacher!  Lets see how it goes 😊

Thanks so much for reading till the end!

Subalalitha