This is going to be a chronicle for my undying love for TA 201, as I had proclaimed a few days ago. Forgive me, but I had my TA exam coming up... and since the subject is purely based on understanding concepts and does not require one to mug at all, you can guess... it was always going to be too easy for me to dig out some time to explain its salient features. But now I'm busy with less important pursuits, like literature, or physics, say... so my conscience demands that I should return to this all important subject as fast as possible. After all, how dare I keep a distance from so wonderful a plethora of abstract thoughts,that TA 201 knocks my door with every now and then !
I have no clue which aspect of the brilliance of this course to emphasize on, its like a rainbow, I feel, with each hue reinforcing the beauty of the next...
The instructor? Well, he rocks. Till now I've slept once in a while in the LHC (lecture hall complex, not the other thing you might be thinking of! ) for every course I've taken here (even Engineering Fluid Mechanics). But this guy radiates genius all over, presenting subtle facts about machines and manufacturing in such a profound tone that you'd have to fight very hard to fall asleep in the lecture hall. He's extremely cool about, and with , mathematics? Confused? Let me explain.
First things first. The world's all mathematics, he announces, with a hint of glee in his voice, so we should be able to deviate our attention from real world processes, like manufacturing... he claims. That's not it. he further goes on to deliberate that he'd put problems in the exam, and they would require real thinking to solve (something totally unlike TechO' , where you have to plug in formulae for the answer, in other words, just mug and you'll rock in TechO', but don't even expect to do so in TA201! ). He gives the marks break-up on the very first day, allotting 10 percent for lab exams , and 4 percent for lab quiz. Half a semester later, he sends us a mail that says 10 percent is reserved for tha lab quiz scheduled on 2nd April. Intrigued by this sudden shake-up of the real number system, I pluck up the courage to go and ask him for clarification. His answer is sharp, and precise : "Why does the total have to be hundred percent? It can be 120, or even 150 percent." I return, satisfied, my faith in arithmetic fully restored by such a wonderful solution to so difficult a problem.
More to come...
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I didnt know you were this good at literature.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I would say you are being a bit too harsh on the instructor. I would say that the problem is with the course and not with the instructor(Well, you know examples of courses where the converse is true).
I have some suggestions :
1) Sarcasm is fun to read but it would be good if you have one post which is a pure facts only, impersonal, take on why you think the course is bad.
2) I guess your style of writing expects everyone is exactly like you : How many do you think are such that when they hear LHC the first thing that comes
to their mind is the Large Hadron Collider? And how many know what TechO is like?