Teaching Style

On September 5th India will celebrate Teachers' day in honour of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, former President of India and former vice-chancellor of my alma mater, Andhra University. This blog is about the teaching styles that I have noticed as a student at various levels. 
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Now that I am approaching the last leg if my postdoc stint, I have started to think about the next stage of my academic life. I will soon be entering the job market. A part of my future plan will involve teaching; I do not as yet know if it is going to be only a handful of lab colleagues or a class full of undergrads. So, I have started thinking about what kind of a teacher I would be. What approach should I adopt? According to Indian tradition, there are two ways to describe the relationship between God and the devotee - "marjala-niti" (the cat principle) and "markata-niti" (the monkey principle). If you have ever seen a cat carry its kitten around, you would have noticed how the kitten is held securely by the mother's teeth. All the work in this relationship is done by the mother; she is responsible for the kitten's safety as well as for transporting it around the town while the kitten only need to hang around there. On the other hand, consider a monkey transporting its infants. While the mother takes care of the transportation part, the baby has to hold on securely and is responsible for its own safety. In this second relationship, there is a division of responsibilities. These descriptions, that are based on parenting styles of two different animals, can as well be extended to describe the relationship between a teacher and a student.

In my opinion, both the models have their virtues and are suitable at different stages of a supervisor-research scholar relationship. The cat-model is relevant during the initial stages when a student is just starting his/her research. They may not know too much about what to do and where to look for information. It would be useful for the supervisor to hold his hand at this stage and lead through the maze. As the student starts to find his feet, it might be a good idea to let him be and figure things out on his own. Let him figure out how to clear the roadblocks in the project, understand what the data is trying to tell and decide the best format (and place) to present (and publish) the data. Trickiest part of this scheme is to identify the right time to transition from a cat to a monkey. I do not, yet, know how good teachers figure that out. With time, I probably will, just like I did at the beginning of my PhD. 
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What is your opinion on the different teaching styles? Do you prefer any one of them or a composite? What is your style? Do let me know in your comments. 

"THAT" moment

I have read this somewhere but don't really remember where. That the greatest motivation for a scientist and the reward they work for is the experience of that one night when he (or she) alone knows a particular secret hidden in the nature's treasure trove before they reveal it to the rest of the world next morning. It is to experience that feeling of discovery that we slog day and night. I have heard people talk of it in research pep talks. I've wanted to experience it and have been waiting for it ever since I started doing research. Through years of being a grad student and a postdoc; and I started my PhD in 2004. I call it the eureka moment. That moment when you see something in your experiments that you hadn't expected when you started. A pleasant surprise. I think that moment for me has come now. 

I am sure you've noticed that I said "think". You see, the way academic research works these days, you can't just jump out of your bathtub and start celebrating butt-naked. And it's never a moment. There is a long gestation period before you can be sure that you have got something good with you. A period when you have to repeat the experiment a number of times, so the observation is reproducible. You also have to think if you have got all the controls right and haven't missed anything. You have to do a number of supporting experiments that can explain the unexpected. Your work then has to be reviewed and approved by your "peers", who you hope don't have a conflict of interest in approving your observation. After all this, you have to be approved by a copy editor somewhere who wants to make sure that you have got your fonts right, the spacing right, the size of images right, their color right, the spellings and grammar right, etc., etc., etc. Only then will your work be published for consumption by the tax paying public that has funded the entire process. By then you would have lost all the enthusiasm to open the cork and it will be time to be back at the bench so you can continue with your efforts to save the humanity (from itself?). And wait for the next eureka moment.