Category — Education

On a quick glance through the posts I’ve made over the last year or so – a glaring theme emerges. Almost all of my latest posts are on “Education” – one way or the other. How loser can a blogger be to have “Education” as one of his categories? Well, ask me. My previous post, which was three months ago during my first break from XL rigour spoke about method in academics, then there is a entry on the menacingly vocational nature of education, and this post on the proof of concept was conceived during one of my numerous disillusioned run-ins with education.

Education as a topic is worse than a lullaby, more potent than pills. To write about education is as dull as Rahul Dravid’s ODI batting strike rate in the mid/late nineties. But with Dravid’s renewed eloquence in 2011, education can take heart. There is hope, still! Random thoughts of a confused/convoluted/demented mind make for good blog posts, you then graduate to love sagas, abstruse lines of poetry, armchair commentary on sport and so on. All make for good reads. Yet, I ended up sticking to prose on education. There is a reason to it.

My father is a education consultant/educator/tutor. And education in the 1990s was orthodox to a great extent. All throughout my schooling, there was tremendous focus on paper and pen education. About solving, erasing, drawing lines, resolving, rewriting, better presentation, practicing, reading text. You get the drift, don’t you? And tuition was encouraged. I must have spent half my life sitting in institution/classes/tuition. School classes, math classes, science classes, competitive exams, Bombay Talent Searches, National Talent Searches, language sessions, lab sessions, Sanskrit classes, computer science courses, C++, Java to list down a few. The best bit is that I was never too enthusiastic about any of them. I am pretty convinced that if I had spent half the hours I have spent in tuition in my life, in practicing (say) water polo or fencing, I would have made the fringes of the Indian national squad, for sure!

Kids in Mumbai waste a quarter of their childhood travelling to tuition. In sweltering heat, with sweat under their armpits and fifty rupees in pocket, most kids travel on about an hour to reach their college/tuition. I used to travel 2 hours a day (1 hour each way) bearing the full brunt of local trains just to “reach” my junior college. And, let me assure you that it is a very difficult task to motivate yourself to pay attention in class/tuition after one hour of ruthless travel. Like most others in my city, I have sat through hours and hours and hours of tuition, listless and confused – most importantly physically and mentally tired. Add t0 that the randomness of engineering in Mumbai where I was sitting in class six hours a day, travelling for another two hours per day with just 40 days of proper holiday per year, and what you get is more education and some more. Add to that the tuition I took for ghastly horrors like engineering drawing and you have some more education. Then education for MBA entrance exams. And then MBA itself.

All throughout my childhood, I was told that tuition was essential for academic and professional development and thattuition was academia itself. (By tuition, I mean the act of an educator/coach delivering concepts/knowledge/gyaan in classroom environment to students). And hence I held all classrooms in very high regard, as if it was my moral duty to absorb all “tuition” that was being delivered. Naive and young, I had no reason to believe that tuition was a farce. As time passed, and I developed some ounce of critical thinking, it slowly crept to me that tuition was not as sacrosanct as it was made out to be. I started finding faults in tuition methodologies. At times, it became very glaring that the educator was simply not putting enough effort into delivering tuition, and here I was on the other end, writhing in frustration because someone else was not doing his job (for what he was being paid for) perfectly. Sometime in the middle of my engineering curriculum, I suffered a total breakdown in faith. I came to the conclusion that, as a student I could do no more. I was trying my level best to be a attentive student, but thetuition and methodologies were failing me over and over again. I sensed no improvement. And from then onwards, a huge part of me resigned to the fact that I would have to make up for this inefficiency in tuition by working on my own, behind closed doors, not only trying to consolidate my understanding, but also make up for the fallacies in tuition and its methods.

According to me, the gaps in a course emerge out of the following themes:

1. Interest: Lack of awareness and understanding of why one is taking the course.

2. Planning: Lack of a solid course structure which would have otherwise allowed the students to plan their way across its duration.

3. Communication: Educators not working on their communication are like batsmen refusing to work on their fielding. Unfortunately, there is no place for either in the modern world.

4. Ambiguity: Some educators, even at this day and age, prefer to thrive on ambiguity and information asymmetry. I thought that these themes vanished back in the 19th century.

5. Relevance: What is taught in class vs what appears in exams vs what is required/relevant in the real world.

6. Trepidation: A feeling of constant fear that if I don’t lick your boots, I will fail in the course.

7. Mindset: Educators need to move from a Theory X mindset to a Theory Y mindset. Students want to learn. And if you can put in honest, quality effort; they will reciprocate with honest, quality work. But it is not easy to put in honest effort being an educator perhaps. Because it entails generating interest, structuring the course, mesmerizing the students with classy communication, reducing ambiguity to zero, bringing in relevance and not abstraction and alleviating any fear in the minds of the students. Clearly, an uphill ask.

In my honest (and worthless) opinion, good schools are those which work systematically towards eliminating all these gaps which agitate student lives. I don’t know what schools these are, and where you find them, but an ideal institution needs to have a publicly available mandate describing its measures/efforts made to tackle and eliminate the above gaps. There are other minor themes to talk about as well, but that would drag this post on forever, so i’ll cease to flirt with them.

In the middle of all the chaos, I ended up securing a University Rank and some obscene scores in my engineering degree. How and more importantly why, I do not know. But a lot of it has to be attributed to this web I had gotten myself into. I would put a lot of effort into every course, not because I wanted to excel badly at it, but because I felt that the tuition and its methods were inadequate and insufficient. I have spent hours and hours inside my study room, contemplating on “How should this have been taught?” , “Say if I were to teach this, how could I do this better?” and thus wasted a whole lot of productive time reworking and reinventing the wheel, to cover up for the foibles of poor tuition. All this in the hope that somewhere down the line the educators would perhaps work a bit harder to deliver quality content, and somewhere down the line I could just go back to my room, put my feet up and relax, knowing that the content had been ably delivered in the classrooms.

When I look back at it, I do not feel bad about the grind as much. On the positive side, it helped me make a lot of friends – for almost always I was the one explaining, elucidating concepts before exams. But it has cost me a fortune. For the last three to four years, I have sacrificed all my interests and desires, for getting entangled in this web, I have never really managed to find time to indulge myself in things that I want to do. I have not attended/enjoyed/pursued as many quizzes as I would have wanted to, never found the peace to prepare for prestigious quiz events. I have given up on cricket totally, and almost all other sports other than football. There have been numerous occasions where I wanted to begin something entrepreneurial, which of course I had to shelve. Regurgitating classroom concepts meant lesser movies, lesser parties, lesser sporting events, lesser life. Compensating for the lack of proper tuition has made me unhappy, unhealthy and grumpy beyond repair. It should not surprise you when I tell you that I’ve not had a proper holiday/vacation/sojourn for four years now. For, I have spent all my vacations doing mundane activities which I wanted to but could not pursue because of the ambiguity, irrelevance and futility of tuition and courses.

But very recently, I have made peace with the fact that the education and tuition is never going to improve drastically. And it is an individual choice that one has to make whether to bother oneself with the clumsy and regressive methods of tuition or just let this phase go, expecting no real value out of the whole deal. What good has come out of this million hours of fruitless labour, is that I now have (very?) sound perspectives about tuition – methods, frameworks, responsibilities of the educators and students, planning, delivery, execution and grades/rewards.  Sometimes, I desperately want to don the hat of an educator for I genuinely feel that I could structure/deliver courses gazillion times better than they are done today. And then I write posts on education, hoping against hope, that someone in the wind would catch the sentiment and tuition would improve in the coming periods. I am a wiser man now. People talk about market research, prospecting to find undervalued stocks, emerging themes and what not –  education for me is the theme of the next decade. There is so much to do in education (as with insurance, bond markets, infrastructure, healthcare and microfinance) that somewhere down the line these ideas about tuition would no doubt bear some fruit. With international schools (as are health/wellness centres) mushrooming all over the country, education presents itself as a lucrative/meaningful opportunity. With added competition, institutions would have to shoulder more responsibility, reinvent themselves, work on their tuition and academic structures in order to survive. And I hope that the generation ahead, will have a better sense of tuition and education than what I was fed. The education theme is so strong that Mckinsey and BCG have set up their own education practices in this country in recent years. There is enough work for everyone!

Given this rather verbose disclosure, my intensity of posts on education will wane. You shall be taken out of your misery, not to worry. But not before I have made you read this another post under the category “Education”. Ha! 1-up on you!

There is a sense of betrayal. I have given up far too much in search of education/tuition and have returned empty handed far too often. Perhaps, it is because my ideas are flawed. Or my decisions. I don’t know. But now, as I see things, it is futile to give up life for the cause of education. There are better causes, more pressing needs (both personal and societal)  in this world to channel your attention onto.

On the 15th of August 2005, about a couple of months after I had passed out of Gokuldham High School, I was called back to school to hoist the national flag. Needless to say, I regard it as one of the proudest moments of my life. My school has a fairly large open area, about the size of two basketball courts. The Independence Day ceremony was held there. A host of dignitaries took to the podium while the students (about 400 of them) were sitting in neatly maintained files on the ground – a large part of which was brown soil while a small patch was covered with cement. White was the flavour of the day. Students, teachers and the non-teaching staff were all dressed in impeccable whites.

Dark clouds were hovering menacingly since morning, and every second person mumbled a silent prayer, trying to delay the advent of any rains. The programme started on time, with groups of students performing gracefully as ever.

(I’ve been to two schools in my life – Pragnya Bodhini High School and Gokuldham High School. One commonality was that both schools were ‘entrenched in culture’, so as to say. I did a lot of culturally significant, socially relevant activities while in these schools. And it made me happy at the end of the day. I never expected any reward. It was just a way of life. Over the last six years, the scenario has changed so badly, that at times, I feel like weeping in a corner)

The prayers were not working, and the weather got more menacing with every passing moment. Within half an hour or so, the heavens opened and it started pouring. Students ran helter-skelter. Some took refuge under trees, some went into the basement. The drizzle stooped within minutes, but it had done a lot of damage. There were puddles of water on the cement. The brown soil had become filthy and gooey. All students came out to the open area and stood looking at each other, waiting for someone to take some initiative. The mumurs got stronger. There was unease in the air.  Neither the students nor the teaching staff wanted to soil their whites and were reluctant to sit in the mud. Our principal, Mrs. Usha Raina, then did something spectacular which still remains fresh in my mind. She caught a whiff of what was happening around her. In no time, she came down from the podium and plonked herself on the ground -  brown slimy dirty patches of mud all over her pristine white sari. After a couple of gasps and shrieks, all the teaching staff and students had gotten back to their positions on the ground and the rest of the programme concluded as planned.

The above for me is the most definitive description of leadership.

I was wondering about ways to define leadership. Say, what makes a good leader? Write five qualities of a leader -

a. Inspiring

b. Forward Thinking

c. Motivating

d…… yada yada

Half way through this method of defining leadership, I realized that one can’t really define leadership. It’s like goodwill or love. Very intangible. Can’t be captured in words. And it’s also very under-rated. When mutual funds/institutions invest in foreign equities, all they see (apart from a certain market cap threshold) is the quality of the senior leadership. Investors who put their faith and money in sound leaderships like Infosys, Unilever, Tata Group, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints have reaped tremendous rewards over the years.

I honestly believe that India has a huge leadership deficit. Not just at the Centre or at the political level, but even in local bodies and communities. And there is a worrying leadership deficit especially in our GenI – impatient, irresponsible and infidel. Although I’ve not done enough to explore different aspects of student life, I still maintain that I’ve really felt sad at the lack of “student leadership” around me for the last six years. More disappointing has been the complete leadership failure of non-students around me – educators, mentors, relatives et cetera. Leadership is not about the number of committees you’ve headed in your life. If it makes you feel any better or worse, I’ve headed none. Leadership is about making a difference.

Can you be taught leadership in college? Can there be a course on “how to lead”? I don’t know. But some colleges and their students have always exhibited better leadership qualities. Perhaps it’s in the air out there. Perhaps it’s in their DNA. Perhaps it’s just a result of focused effort. So, about a week ago, when I was given a chance to join Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) for their MBA course, what I immediately told myself was, “Dude! Its XLRI! The cradle of leadership!”.

To put it in cricketing parlance, if the famed IITs are known for producing Sachin Tendulkars, XLRI gives the world its Mahendra Singh Dhonis. The world identifies with a good leader. Although Dhoni’s batting average might not be amongst the world’s best, there is no questioning his brand equity or the respect he commands from his peers. And a lot of it has got to do with exemplary leadership – Winning captain of the T20 World Cup, Winning Captain of the 2011 World Cup, Captain of the top Test playing Nation – perhaps the best leader Indian cricket has ever had.

Leadership has always been a huge turn on for me. I used to get goosebumps when Leander Paes led India in Davis Cup ties or when Patrick Vieira led out Arsenal or when Steven Gerrard inspired his Liverpool troops. I secretly dreamt of “playing under” such a leader.

If I do end up joining XLRI in a month’s time, it’ll never be about the big money or the big ticket. It’ll be more about understanding, appreciating and imbibing leadership – a quality that is very scarce these days. And as we all know, scarcity creates value! And what better place to put an end to this leadership deficit of six years other than “The Cradle of Leadership” which incidentally happens to be in Mahendra’s home state. Perhaps he’ll be able to teach me a few things during my vacations

Sport mirrors life. There’s a lot more to sport, than what the television broadcasters offer us, and I’ve always looked at sports as an invaluable medium to inculcate life lessons. A lot of stories today – all from sporting careers. And a lot to learn. There’s an African, a Brit, a Pakistani and a New Zealand national – no world beaters as such, but winners in a not so usual a contest.

Collins Obuya is your average frail Kenyan who looked like he’d blown away by Shaun Tait’s bouncers in a recent World Cup encounter. Obuya burst onto the scene in the 2003 World Cup and impressed all with his leg spinners. He picked up 13 wickets at an average 28.76 in the 2003 World Cup and took a career best 5 for 24 in Kenya’s win over Sri Lanka at Nairobi. Hailed as the successor to Asif Karim, Obuya was touted as the best young spinner in Africa. His stellar performances earned him a contract with Warwickshire in the English League. In the months to follow, the ball just wouldn’t turn for Obuya. He faced health issues, his bowling deteriorated and he couldn’t buy a wicket.  Obuya has thirty ODI wickets to his name. He had 25 till 2003, which means he’s picked up five wickets in the last seven years, after earning his contract with Warwickshire. To much surprise, Obuya has played in both the 2007 and 2011 World Cups. Not as a leg spinner, but as a specialized middle order batsman. Obuya is Kenya’s highest run-getter in the 2011 World Cup with a healthy average of 48.60, scoring a 98* against the mighty Australians.

James Franklin made his Test debut in 2000 when he played as a seamer against Pakistan. He scored a pair (zero runs in either innings) to kick start his Test Career. For the last three years, he has been a permanent fixture in New Zealand’s batting order. In his first year in international cricket, he had a batting average of 7. He averages 54 in one day internationals played in 2011. Franklin suffered a knee injury in 2006-07 and was never the same bowler. That he switched his core competency from being a bowler to a batsmen given the circumstances, is what still guarantees him a spot in the Kiwi side.

The highest wicket taker in the 2011 World Cup is our very own Shahid Bhai. With twenty one wickets to his name, he’s outperformed stalwarts like Muralidaran and Harbhajan Singh. The problem is that he started his career as an opening batsman, some twelve years ago. Afridi was ferocious with the bat in the late nineties. Aged 16 years and 217 days, Afridi became the youngest player to score an ODI century. In his first international innings, Afridi broke the record for fastest century in ODI cricket, reaching his hundred from 37 balls. The eleven sixes he struck also equalled the record for most in an ODI innings. Batting was his calling or so it seemed. Sometime in the middle of the last decade, he was found out by international bowlers. And runs came to trickle. His technique and approach was not good enough to merit him a spot in the team as a specialized batter. He had to develop his bowling to remain a part of the Pakistan side. As things stand currently, Shahid Afridi is Pakistan’s most successful spinner. His 313 ODI wickets make him Pakistan’s third highest wicket taker behind Wasim and Waqar. Not bad for a Pathan, for whom batting was his ‘true calling’.

Rebecca Romero has two Olympic medals – a Silver in 2004 and a Gold in 2008. What makes it special is that the 2004 medal was won in Rowing and the 2008 triumph was in cycling. A champion rower – she won a silver medal at the Athens 2004 Olympics in the quadruple sculls, and the following year was part of the British crew that won the 2005 World Championships in the quad sculls. In 2006, she quit rowing due to a chronic back problem. But she couldn’t give up her love for sport and the stomach for a fight. She took up cycling and made rapid advances. The individual gold at the Beijing Olympic was her crowning glory.

We have been told a lot of times, stories of companies going out of business as they failed to embrace change, failed to adapt themselves with the need of the markets and the consumers, failed to innovate. A lot of corporate branding has to do with change and dynamism as well. More importantly, a lot of careers hit a roadblock, when the employee fails to reinvent himself in the workspace.

How difficult is it to reinvent yourself professionally? Suppose an employee working at a desk for four years just realises that his core skills are no longer good enough to sustain him in the market. What does he do? Surely, pick up something else. That he can’t afford to given that he is so highly leveraged is another issue altogether.

Why are certain people able to reinvent themselves faster and more peacefully than others? How can Sachin Tendulkar rule over all three versions of cricket, whereas most others invariably restrict themselves to one form? Anurag Behar, in his latest column talks about two extremes in philosophy of education – “the liberal educationist” and “the instrumental educationist”. He says -

The “liberal educationist” believes in education for its own sake: That only learning anchored in deep thoughts and broad perspectives can be called education; that stoking the thirst for knowledge is sufficient to handle life. To him, thinking of how education can prepare someone for a vocation is somewhere between ludicrous and sacrilegious.

The “instrumental educationist” wants the child to prepare for employment— the earlier the better. After all, the real purpose of education is generating livelihood—everything must be aligned to that. Skills and knowledge relevant to employment must be central to the curriculum. In this view, the ability to think critically, perspectives about society and scientific understanding of nature are somewhere between distractions and unaffordable luxuries.

As graduates in India, the focus on instrumental education is very high. Liberal views are not valued by the system, peers or examiners. The current focus of Indian education, especially IT, is on vocation, which aims at transforming lifestyle and eating habits more than anything else. There is no impetus for thought per se, and the confluence of thoughts from various walks of life. And this method of learning perhaps, is what makes most Indian graduates very rigid; very inflexible. Because most students are taught to study for a particular vocation, it becomes difficult to change career tracks at a later stage. Most of us join engineering because a mediocre engineer earns more than a mediocre lawyer or a mediocre artist or a mediocre footballer or a mediocre keyboard player or a mediocre ballet dancer.

Say you are the 256,443 rd best engineer in the country. You’d still be having a six digit annual salary. And a 256,443 rd best physiotherapist in this country would be jobless. The problem is that they day India needs 256,442 skilled engineers, you’ll have nowhere to go, if your education has not been a marriage of the the two extremes mentioned above.

Realising that your core skills which you’ve been nurturing for more than half a decade, are not good enough for the marketplace, can be a very damning experience. But as a lot of sportspersons have showed, it’s not the end of the world. With the right mentality and “soft skills” or “soft attributes”, mastering another domain or vocation, is not really out of reach. Viren Rasquinha captained the Indian hockey team and then studied management and currently heads the operations of the Olympic Gold Quest. So, if you are 21, and totally out of sync with your current vocation/training, all’s not lost. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of this country is a production engineering graduate. Take heart. Have patience. Strengthen your “non-functional” skill base. Vocation training is easy.

Dear XAT,

A big thank you for showing me how naive a MBA aspirant I am. I guess you are a bit grumpy as your sub-standard cousin of the feline nature has been hogging the lime-light over the past decade, and you choose this time of the year to strike back at the empire. But I am starting to like you a bit. You comprehensively defeated me today. Not out-witting me with petty constraints like time, or difficulty level, or ambiguity. But, in some way, you defeated my thought process. It just made me realise, that *perhaps* I am a one-trick pony and the way I approach a MBA-type exam is not fool proof. It lacks innovative thinking, and how! Thank you again, for trying indicate that I am still a big ball of sh1t. I will be richer for this experience. If you can spare some time from gloating in your vanity, please do read on.

About a month ago, I took IIFT in the middle of my engineering examinations. Like a brash kid, I woke up from sleep and blindly entered the examination hall without an ounce of any preparation over the week leading into the exam. I got out feeling really happy, because everything in the paper made a lot of sense. A month later, I was attributed a score of 46.06 (which dare I say would have put me in the top 25-50 applicants in the country). A sense of  ”I belong to MBA” started flowing through my veins. And I was pretty much convinced that I had the aptitude for these kind of examinations. That I could walk into an MBA exam and still be on par with people who have slogged their backsides for it.

Mind you, I am not proud of being under-prepared. Far from. Circumstances under which I am working have been very acute over the last two years. And I do not have much room to flex my muscles. I know you are having a wry smirk on your face and are trying to indicate that the situation will get worse once I graduate. But believe me on this one, my case is an outlier. I believe things will get better once I graduate. Not the point.

Similarly, I went in today with little “specialized” preparation, and was found out. Stamping your authority, you bluntly stated that aptitude could not be a substitute for methodical preparation. At least in my case. The reason I feel especially violated is because my “intuitive approach” fell flat on its face today. More often than not, when I see a question which I don’t know how to go about, I innovate, back-substitute, punt and get to the final answer in a way that might not be the most efficient path to reach to the solution. But it works. To cut a long story short, I have a knack of “reaching to an answer” in questions where I ideally shouldn’t. The exact opposite happened today. Forget punting to get to an answer, I couldn’t get to answers that I should have. I felt that my innovativeness was still a couple of notches short. Next time when we meet, I hope to hone my punting skills to a level that you want or better I might just be so well prepared that I won’t need to fall back to street-smartness.

Let me appreciate you specifically on a few questions.

Q.  On 1st March, Timon arrived in a new city and was looking for a place to stay. He met a landlady who offered to rent her apartment at a reasonable price but wanted him to pay rent on a daily basis. Timon had a silver bar of 31 inches, and an inch of the silver bar was equal to one day’s rent. He agreed to pay an inch of the silver bar towards the daily rent. Timon wanted to make the minimum number of pieces of the bar but did not want to pay any advance rent. How many pieces did he make?

5     8     16       20     31

-> I wasted three minutes on this. And gave up. While coming back, within fifteen seconds it all fell into place. Total number of combinations for a n bit binary number = 2^n -1. So 3 bits can represent 0-7. 4 bits 0-15. And hence 5 bits can represent 0-31. So you would just need five pieces of lengths 2^0=1, 2^1=2,2^2=4,2^3=8,2^4=16 and you are done. To make it worse, I am a Computer engineering student and have been doing binary arithmetic for four years now. I know I wasn’t sharp today but again, I love you interpretations of basic systems.

Q. The micromanometer in a certain factory can measure the pressure inside the gas chamber from 1 to 999999 units. Lately, the instrument has not been working properly. The problem is that it always skips the digit 5 and moves directly from 4 to 6. What is the actual pressure inside the gas chamber if the micromanometer shows 3016?

->To be honest, I did not even read this question in the stipulated two hours. After the paper, as I flipped through the pages, it took be fifteen seconds without a pencil in hand:(

Isn’t this a classic case of –

Initially – 0 to 9 all available – base 10 (decimal) system.

Modified case – 0 1 2 3 4 6 7  8 9 – base 9

So you are just asking me- (3016)9  = (?)10. Well it is 3*729+1*9+6=2187+9+6=2202.

Again, good question. Too bad I missed it

Recently, I heard reports that Kapil Sibal is getting anxious at your competency and you might be barred from seducing minds from the next academic year. I pray to God that it does not happen. CAT is of the more docile kind, like the female you would perhaps settle down with. You are the firebrand achiever – one part an intellectual and one part a sultry seductress. Making a choice between the two often proves to be the defining moment of most people’s life. I’m at that crossroads too. But I do hope to meet you again, next year. Otherwise, I’ll be ruing the fact that I botched up the only chance I got at scoring with the most alluring lady in the pack. You can have your bunch of playmates for this year. I’ll be back next year, better prepared for one, sharper too. And I will make an offer that you just won’t be able to resist. Ok. Sorry, I know you hate cliches.

Also, to let you know honey, I always err on the side of caution. And estimate on the dearer side. But to be very frank, I think I’ll miss your criteria by not more than 7-10 marks. And that too when I had a real stinker of a paper. Just imagine what will happen when I am sharp and playing to 80% of my potential. The possibilities are endless

Love,

CGK.