Ahh…I slept again.

Medusa’s stone gaze has been known as a great fable. Well at least until the modern classroom was invented.

Its 9a.m. Today I’ve decided to listen and learn in all earnest. I’m completely prepared. Eight hours of sleep, breakfast perked up with caffeine and the first seat. Sleeping would be impossible. The professor comes in, and a voice in my mind recites what I had read in some guide to getting more out of a class, “Make eye contact. Jot down essential points… ” I know; lame. The lecture starts, “today we will be discussing blah (on no!), blah (no, NO!), and blaahhh…. ”

As the inexplicable paralysis let go of its deathly grip, I was able to see the professor leaving the class. Thank You. Ironically, I enjoyed your class, by sleeping through it.

Professors need to add more juice to their lectures. There is no way that this fact can be under-emphasized, especially now, with all the new media of learning (and distraction) right at the fingertips of the students. The classroom needs an upgrade, and a phenomenal one, right from the texts to the infrastructure to the teaching method itself, unless we want it to be extinct, from our cultural context.

The best way to bring about this evolution is to make students, around whom the issue revolves in the first place, an integral part of it. Our director takes great pride in us, for being very responsible bacchas, managing stuff on our own, moving forward without hesitation, without bending over. Then, it is time our ideas start to gain more ground, right into academics, which has remained the holy grail of the IIT system. There are one gazillion things we’d like to change, but complaining to deaf ears is simply a waste of time and energy. We must work towards building a model student body, which houses some responsibility as to what it wants to learn and what needs to be changed, to explore new vistas of engineering with integrity and sincerity.

This change is revolutionary, and cannot be had in a short frame of time. If we are to grow, we have to act now, demanding changes, about things that we don’t like or want, even those that are seemingly trivial. Case in point: course feedback. We are asked for suggestions so that future classes will be better. But what about us, now? Are we ever asked about what we expect, what we would like to be different during the course? Do we have a system to tell the professor what we think, say, two weeks after the course begins, and do so anonymously?

The introduction of such reforms is a part of the baby-steps we must take, all of us, in order to scale the heights of technical excellence. People judge an educational institute by the students it presents to the world. In this respect the greatest asset of an IIT is a group of dedicated and motivated students. Surely, all of us want to be so.