I too was "a bit of an Idiot"

I watched the movie 3 Idiots just yesterday. Loved it. The movie raked up old memories. Penning down some of them here.
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Once in my pre-university class, my Physics lecturer asked me to state the Coulomb's law. I started talking about the electrostatic interaction between charged particles. She said "all that is OK, but state the law - as it is in the text book". This is something I'm really bad at. I simply cannot state laws exactly as printed in the books. She then said "how will you score marks in the board exams? Some evaluators will not award you marks if your answer is not in a particular way".

 I lost the ability to answer a question paper in a "particular way" in school itself. It was in the sixth standard that I was introduced to proper methods of learning. After every few classes, my Science teacher would ask us questions on the corresponding topics that required students to ‘think’. Since then, I never bothered about the school notes (which were nothing more than ‘parrot’ answers to the list of questions given at the end of every chapter in the text book). Reading the text book thoroughly and answering based on whatever I had understood became a habit which extended to other subjects too.

In the seventh grade, my Hindi teacher had a different approach toward notes. We had to draw a picture based on the lesson taught and answer all the questions on our own. If the picture was striking or the answers were out of the ordinary, she would write “good” on the pages. We would eagerly wait to see how many ‘good’s were in our notebook!

My History teacher in eighth standard taught so well that I listened to all her lectures with rapt attention. History was never this interesting. It was then that I learnt that the subject was lot more than wars, dates, chronological order and tongue-twisting names of some of the prominent personalities from across the globe.

Later in college, I got tired of many of the classes which were more like tapes of definitions, assumptions, laws, proofs and derivations being played multiple times. Only the classes handled by our HOD were inspiring. Bandopadhyay Sir had worked with various government organizations and post retirement, he took up teaching. Alongside preparing us for the exams, he would narrate so many anecdotes. What a raconteur he was!

Sir was not a conventional teacher to demand “pin-drop-silence” in the class. Once I could not resist looking out of the window at the fighter aircraft sortieing in the sky (our college was located near the Air Force Base) He noticed that and simply smiled. Other lecturers were not so kind.

Sir never spoke in a raised voice. Once when students were making a lot of noise, he shouted “shut up”. After a few minutes he said “sorry” for that! Unfortunately, we have lost him. He succumbed to cancer the day after our final exam of BE in 2009.

If not for these mentors in my life, I would not have been “a bit of an Idiot”!

PostScript:

In high school notes became a mere formality. I never referred to them unless I had prepared them.

HOD- Head of the department

Just to let you know – I was two marks short of a centum in Physics

The scene in the movie where Burkha clad women were being photographed – it seemed to convey a lot without any lines being spoken!

 Current Song:

Welcome To My Life by Simple Plan

Do you ever feel like breaking down?
Do you ever feel out of place?
Like somehow you just don't belong
And no one understands you
Do you ever wanna run away?...