Thoughts on Teachers' Day

The Doctoral students invited me to be part of the Teachers' Day celebration. I shared a joke with them which I am repeating here.

There was a preacher and a bus driver.

The preacher used to conduct the mass in the church. He used to give messages like be be good, be kind, love thy neighbour etc. His mass was repetitive, boring and least engaging.

The bus driver was a rogue. He used drink and drive. He used drive too fast. He never followed any traffic rules. The passengers in the bus and the public outside used to be very afraid.

The preacher and the bus driver died on the same day. They landed at the pearly gates. St. Peter looked at their records and asked the preacher to go to hell and the bus driver to heaven.

The preacher was shocked. He could not believe the decision of St. Peter. The preacher told  he was a man of god, he always advised people to be good, he himself led a exemplary life. St. Peter told that the decision has been made and cant be changed. The preacher demanded an explanation.

St Peter said when you were preaching people were sleeping but when the driver was driving they were praying.

We encounter two kinds of teachers: ones like the preacher and the others like the bus driver. The first kind believes in teaching in a boring way while the second kind makes you learn in their own unique way. The most memorable teachers are the second kind who pushed students against the wall.

Diffuculties of being honest

I admire Gurcharan Das. He was a former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India and now an author and news paper column writer.

He has written a book called Difficulties of Being Good. It revolves around various episodes of Mahabharata and raises ethical questions. One classic one is where Arjun questions the war against his own family members. There is link to a youtube video at the end of the blog

In IIIT, we have always believed in being truthful and being honest. It is not easy when the truth and honesty involves talking about not so nice things about ourselves.

This year I made a rather long presentation before the parents of freshman students. Among the many things I talked about, here are a few:

• Students have lost lives due to misadventure or illness
• Students have flunked in examinations
• Students have been detained for a year due to indiscipline
• Students have been fined heavily for stealing or damaging Institute property
• Students do not become eligible for placement due to poor CGPA
• and a few more..

Also I talked about our achievements in the last few years.

I have often wondered whether such true but negative incidents will turn away potential students and their parents. Whether we will be perceived as a pessimistic Institute.

One of the parents of a freshman student met me later. He told me that he had investigated (he is a vigilance officer) about the Institute. In fact he had more refined statistics about the Institute than I had. He knew about most the negative incidents I mentioned above. He appreciated the courage and the honesty of the Institute in narrating such stuff while meeting the parents the first time. He told that he is now certain that his ward is in the right place for next four years.

One may achieve temporary results through lie and deceit but lasting achievements come from being being truthful and honest, having a vision and working towards it, accepting both success and failure and learning from them. This strategy has paid rich dividends in last few years.

And, I hope that being truthful and honest never becomes too difficult a job for us.

In two days time, 69th Independence will be on us. Jai Hind.

NBA Accreditation

Autonomy is not autonomy.

Let me elaborate. The University status gives the Institute autonomy of many kinds. We can offer new programmes. We can institute new degrees. We can fix our fees. And many more.

We want to be known for our programmes in masters and doctoral level. At these level, we must provide assistantship to the masters and doctoral students. As a self-financing Institute, we do not have the resources to do that. Hence, we depend on other agencies to provide these financial help.

When we started Ph.D. programme last year, we requested the Government of Odisha to provide a few scholarships to the Ph.D. students. As always, the Government has gracefully obliged.

We get Assistantship for Masters programmes from AICTE. This year we started a new Master's Programme. However, before we can apply for scholarships to AICTE, we needed to be accredited by NBA.

Now, accreditation has a lengthy preparatory process. The process is based on defining outcomes and working backwards.

This year's faculty retreat is devoted to preparing ourselves for NBA accreditation.

We plan to get a couple of departments accredited by next year.

Wish us luck.

Uniqueness of IIIT

This is a question I face often. Perhaps, no one is in a better position than me to answer this question.

In my days as a MBA student, I learnt about Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of a brand. Why will any one buy a product - because of its USP. Every consumer product has a USP given in the form a slogan. For Volkswagen it is Das Auto. For KFC it is Finger Licking Good.

One slogan which stayed with me is by a car rental company called Avis. The slogan is we try harder.

Here are more images of that campaign: https://www.google.co.in/search?q=avis+we+try+harder+campaign&hl=en

I believe No2ism should apply to our Institute. We are certainly not No 1 or No 2. I shall be happy if some one says we are No 20. What can be the USP of a young Institute like ours.

With no shame, I shall borrow the tagline of Avis:

• We try harder. 

Also, I shall add more No2isms:

• We are Hungry for success because we are not No 1
• We are Humble because we are not No 1
• We are Honest because we can not afford otherwise

However, there three types of people in our community:

• The ones who believe we are No 2 and hence they try hard
• The ones who believe they are No 1 or may be No. 0 (which is better than No 1) and hence do not try hard
• And the ones who believe we are no 2000 and hence no point trying harder.

Fortunately, the first category is the majority. We have to eliminate the second and the third categories by bringing them to the first category.

I have been talking to the students about this. Both at a personal as well as Institutional level, this is a great doctrine: We try harder. 

Capacity Building

In XIMB there was a center called Cenderet. It was brain child of Fr. Bogaert, a Belgian father. Cenderet mostly did rural development work. They will do a lot of training programmes called Capacity Building. I was always a little confused by this. I always wondered if Capacity building is synonymous with training.

When IIIT started there were very few employees: 2 to be exact. I wondered what can two people do. In other words, I was asking the question what is the capacity of two employees:  the capacity for Institution building. I was wondering if capacity is proportional to the employee strength.

Yesterday, I was witness to the high mast lamps being hoisted and installed in the tennis courts. These lamps have been fabricated in-house in our tiny workshop. The procurement to fabrication to installation is being done by our own people. This is a unique capacity of the Institute which was built over a few years. This saves us a lot of money. But more than saving money, it shows a peripheral activity like the workshop can contribute so much towards the Institute Building.

We have built our own ERP for Administration, education delivery. That is a unique capacity.

We have done the project management of our construction. This is also a very unique capacity.

However, on several core fronts of the Institute, we either depend on others or do a shoddy job our selves. The capacity is sadly missing in these activities.

Capacity is what you can do with your own hands and what an organization can do with its own people. The capacity is both capability and willingness to go the extra mile. Often, one or the other is missing. I hope we develop more capacity in many aspects of our operations.

Two Stories for the Teacher's day

Here are two stories about teachers. One picked from the Internet and the other is a story my father told me.

The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson

“If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long!”

I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.

I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the “Best Ice Cream in America.” 

I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society”. Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!

In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced - equal parts ignorance and arrogance.

As soon as I finished, a woman’s hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant – she was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.

She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”

I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.” 

“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?” 

“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.

“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.

“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.

“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”

In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.

“I send them back.”

“That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!” 

In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!” 

And so began my long transformation. 

Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night. 

None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.

A student visits a teacher in the Hospital

My father was a high school teacher. In one of his classes, he observed a student. He was not attentive. He was gossiping with other students. My father warned him a couple of times. But, the student continued to disturb. In a fit of rage, he threw the duster at him. It hit his fore head. He started bleeding profusely. My father dismissed to class and went to see the headmaster to report what happened. The head master was alarmed. He said the student is son of a local politician and the incident is sure to cause trouble for the school and my father. He advised my father to take leave and disappear for a while. My father followed his advice.

Many years later, my father was admitted to the hospital for a surgery. Many people visited him. An young man visited him with a bouquet of flowers and wished quick recovery. My father told him that he could not recognize him. The young man told him that he is a bank manager. He was a student in the school where my father worked. It was he who was subjected the duster missile and that that incident had changed his life. He became a serious student and eventually did well in his career.

I was amazed to see that being hit by a duster made him grateful enough to visit my father in the hospital when he heard about his illness.

Happy teachers' day!

Enforceable Rules and Courage to Enforce them

The faculty members spent a week for a retreat in last week of June.

We discussed various aspects of the Institute's function. In particular, we discussed regarding the academic regulations for the B.Tech. programme.

The view was that we should have a rigorous regulations. I always asked the following questions

• Is the rule enforceable. It is a very fundamental questions. We translate a principle into a rule. We may agree with the principle. However, when we try to enforce it, we encounter difficulties in the form of a. too much administrative work, b. difficult to measure the act or c. unfair consequences.
• Does the rule work fine in the boundary conditions. This is the programmer in me asking the question: have we exhausted all the possibilities in a if-then-else statement. Often the rules we make fail in the boundary conditions.
• Is the rule fair to the people on whom it is being applied.

These questions often result near perfection and refinement of the rules.

The people who violate the rules often think that the authorities will not have the courage to implement for emotional, humanitarian and other such reasons.

 

Among many decision taken in the Institute the most difficult ones were to detain some students for a year, asking some students to leave the hostel and non renewal of contract of some staff members. These were emotionally tough decisions to make but necessary to bring some discipline and sanity into the Institute's functioning. I hope we will never have take such decisions but if the situation demands we should not shirk our responsibility to take the decision.