Teaching

Philosophy and Methodology:

Teaching is an opportunity to me to share the joy of learning and the passion for research with the fresh brains. I believe that providing intuitions and emphasizing the essentials are often more important than teaching detailed knowledge about a specific topic. As a teacher, my objective is to provide the students with the problem solving skills that will be useful beyond the classroom.

I had started learning computer science, since my bachelor program. Several core subjects and some advanced topics had been taught in my bachelor and master programs. I have had the opportunity to study the core subjects of computer science from some very intellectual and expert teachers of the respective fields at that time in India. I would like to follow those techniques in my teaching. I learned from them that there is no specific model that would always lead to perfect teaching, as students learn in individual ways and different topics require varying teaching styles. Some students learn mostly from lectures, others prefer learning in small groups, and yet others learn best by studying on their own and asking questions in a one to one setting. Teaching a class therefore involves much more than just lecturing.

I believe, lectures should be engaging, well prepared, and should ideally involve demonstrations of important algorithms and concepts in a practical setting. I firmly believe that a proper illustration or interactive demonstration provides clearer intuition and illuminates a concept better than any number of words or pseudo-codes. Whenever I teach a topic, I prefer to describe the overview first and then I discuss the importance and applications of the topic in practice. Therefore I like to discuss some problems for each specific topic and the tricks to solve them. I generally explain the philosophy on which an algorithm or model is developed and then try to describe the theoretical aspects using examples. I prefer to organize some real life case studies or potential problems as home tasks and then ask the students to solve them. I generally organize presentations by the students on different such home tasks as class test. I believe, this would provide better understanding of a topic rather than only going through the books and materials.