Look whos doing their homework now

Updated on: Wednesday, September 07, 2011

A lecture hall is no longer just that. It’s an open space, a radioactively charged arena from where come large ideas, where fierce debates take place and finally something precious emerges: profound clarity.

To conduct a class is a test, an everyday battle for the professor, who can no longer march in with a text and read passages or solve problems from there. Teachers, including the heavyweights who have published their own works, confess they have to study before they take the next lecture; they know students can be brutal with their inquisition.

Last week, when R Narayanaswamy, a professor at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, cited an equity report released by a Canadian company that damned an Indian conglomerate, he was shocked to find that some of his students had already read it. “Information is no longer exclusive; earlier the teacher had an information advantage. Now, at one level you feel that the teacher is irrelevant, but he is required to analyse, decipher and show the larger picture. For all this, the teacher needs to prepare as things are becoming obsolete a lot quicker now,” the finance professor says. When Narayanaswamy started teaching in 1986, there were half-a-dozen accounting standards packed in a 50-page text. Today, the book is 2,000 pages long, with hundreds more standards.

Hours after the day closes at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, the faculty block, at the other end of the academic area, is buzzing with activity. IIT-B’s Prakash Gopalan, who has been teaching for close to two decades, says that it is almost a crime to not prepare before a lecture. Going extempore is not advisable, he says, for the lecture may flow in any direction, it can get repetitive and what one intends on covering, may not get done. “Students on this campus are extremely sharp and you don’t want to lose face. For if that happens, no matter how hard a salvage process you put in, the road ahead can be nasty,” he says.

Teaching, once an avocation, is now more than a full-time job; working over time that was strictly a domain of the private sector has quietly seeped into this profession. Take the case of Himanshu Rai, who teaches negotiation skills and leadership to students at IIM-Lucknow. Rai reads up on negotiation from a variety of sources and often turns to literature books when teaching leadership. “I prepare so that students have a tangible takeaway from my class. I know that I am teaching the brightest brains of this country and preparation is essential,” says Rai.

Ask Rekha Bahadur, vice-principal of HR College and she will tell you how animated her students get when she discusses the Indian economy. She’s been teaching since 1979, but feels the need to prepare from various sources before taking class. She says, “A teacher is no longer a stage actor, but a guide by the side.” As she says, it’s not a lecture she is going to take. It’s long conversation she is going to have with her students.

Look whos doing their homework now

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