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. 

Talking about Talks

In popular culture, the stereotype of a scientist is that of an introvert and a recluse. I do not know if this is based on the observation of real life lab-rats or its the product of a writer's imagination. Either way, it has come to be accepted by the larger populace outside the academic world. But, from looking at my own colleagues and the wider research fraternity, this stereotype is as bad as every New York cab driver being an Indian. The fact is that the reclusive, loner scientist is probably an endangered species being driven to the brink of extinction by a growing culture of academic cliques and the increasing prominence of collaborative research. It is now important that you network with the right people, employ the appropriate jargon and attend the popular conferences. The funding agencies and grants' review committees tend to be more sympathetic towards projects with an inter-disciplinary character which might require that you need to have at least a working relation with folks who have an entirely different way of looking at a problem. Then there are the hiring committees that ensure that you humour and stay in touch with every supervisor and every committee member that you had ever worked with, so that you can furnish some 10 or 15 reference letters with your application. So, in this new and improved (?) world of academic research, being good at communication is as important (if not more) as knowing science. And one of the most important means of scientific communication is to talk about your work. You give talks at lab meeting, at departmental seminars, at student/post-doc association meetings, at conferences, at job interviews, etc etc etc. Considering that giving talks is such an important, and frequent, part of an academic's life, its a real surprise that many researchers are not good at it. 
As a graduate student, I worked at an isolated, multi-disciplinary research centre and had very few opportunities to listen to talks from external researchers. But when I started my first postdoc position at a medical college in the Tri-Institution area of New York, it was like going from being starved to being obese; there was at least one (but usually more) talk every week. I have attended talks by some of the best researchers, working on almost every possible problem in life sciences, sitting in the same room with Nobel laureates, sometimes more than one (as a grad student, I remember going to a seminar by Sydney Brenner and being so overwhelmed at seeing a Nobel laureate that I didn't hear anything he spoke). Now, as a postdoc at a conventional university with all the different faculties ranging from humanities to engineering, I get to attend talks on such variety of topics from the effects of Indian residential schools to monitoring bike traffic to develop a better signalling system. Of the hundreds of  talks that I might have attended, there are only a handful that really had my attention throughout. But this is in no way a comment on the quality or novelty of the work discussed but on the style of presentation. Recently, there was a "job seminar" in the department (I really look forward to attending those as an opportunity to collect tips for my own performance when the time comes). I was a little extra interested since the candidate had an Indian name, was from Harvard and had done some excellent work. But during the seminar, she looked nervous and overwhelmed by the occasion and overall the performance was a let down. On another occasion, the candidate's talk was so monotonous and understated that it was really hard to feel the excitement of the work. Recently, there was another seminar by a very senior scientist. Again the work was excellent but for some reason, the presenter tried hard to avoid eye contact with the audience; most of the time he looked at some empty space towards the end of the seminar hall. Good writing or talking may not make up for bad work, but bad writing or talking can certainly let down some really good work. That was the lesson I learnt from that experience. Whenever I myself give a seminar on my work, I try to keep the presentation the way I like to hear; informal, without too much jargon, assuming no one knows anything about my work and overall having the feel of a conversation rather than a sermon. My first real research presentation was during the first meeting of my doctoral committee. I had made what I thought was a bunch of good powerpoint slides, reviewing a lot of literature on the Gap Junctions (a lot of which I only barely understood then) and describing the plans for my PhD project. In my mind, I had a clear picture of how I was going to talk and explain my project. But I was so nervous that as soon as I was asked to talk, I could not recognize anything from the presentation I myself had prepared.  At the end of that disastrous presentation, my supervisor gave me an advice that I still use while preparing for a seminar to this day. Preparing for a talk is not about making powerpoint slides. Its about planning what you are going to say about each figure on each slide. A good way to do that is to write down or type down exactly what you are going to speak about each slide. This helps to keep the talk compact by staying focussed and to stay away from rambling about aimlessly. The one mantra that has served me well through the many academic talks all these years is that "good talks are well practiced talks". 

Update (5:10PM 16 June 2014):

Wanted to add a quick note. Whether the science in your talk is good or not, whether your presentation is good or not, it is always important to watch your manners. I had once attended a workshop at IISc, Bangalore. Most of us  participating were grad students. One of the workshop speakers was a young professor from JNCASR, Bangalore. During the seminar, while he was still talking, raised his leg onto a desk, placed his foot facing the audience and started tying his shoe lace. I do not know if he was in some unbearable discomfort that he needed to retie his shoe laces then and there. But I thought that was improper and extremely arrogant behavior from someone who at least at that time was like a teacher for us.