I had been lucky sometimes to run into groups of academically brilliant people: sometimes amazed by their depth of knowledge that I was unable to gouge, sometimes awed by their intensity of efforts to gather knowledge, sometimes wonder-struck by their ability to explain, sometimes surprised by their strong memory and their wide readings. True, I could not get the best out of my such association with brilliant minds. But among them the best I experienced were the brilliant teachers: some of them were equally brilliant scholars as well.In the economics honors class, we had three students who had done better than me in the higher secondary examination: two of them were among the top 10 in the humanities stream. Another had secured the first position in the equivalent Pre-University Examination. A couple of my classmates had come over from science stream to study economics. One had passed the equivalent Indian Schools Certificate Examination with high scores. There were others who were just about average like me. I was a bit surprised that most of the toppers at the higher secondary examination did not come to study economics as the major. About 60% of my classmates did not sudy matyhematics beyong class X at the higher secondar school.
The brilliant students did not appear to be that brilliant after all as we went in to study economics at the undergraduate level. Some of them were handicapped by their inadequacy in mathematics, some in English and some who had come from districts far away from Kolkata just got carried away by the freedom they enjoyed after they started living in hostels. But I was amazed by one of the toppers at the higher secondary examinations while discussing with him something about price theory. He referred to without looking at any book to a specific page number of the textbook and described how the diagram on the top of the page looked like. It seemed to me that he could while looking at me could still see the image of the particular page of the book. What a tremenodously strong camera-like memory!
The faculty in economics was probably the best in economics in terms of quality of teaching among all the colleges at that time in West Bengal. All theteachers had top class academic record in economics and the graduate and post-graduate levels. Of the 6 teachers ( Dhiresh Bhattacharyya, Tuhinagshu Bhattacharyya, Amalendu Babu, Prabudh Nath Roy, Nabendu Sen and Ajit Sengupta), two were Phds and one was completing his Phd. All of them were oustanding teachers and took special care to check if the students were able to absorb and learning. Within a month after the classes started, they took a number of smallclass tests to evaluate the impact of their teaching and also the relative absorption capacity of their pupils. On that basis they formed ghrups of two each with one strong and one not so strong student for collaborative study. Not that such collaboration helped much for all the students, but we knew where we stood in the evaluation of the teachers and our future potential. It restored self-confidence that I had lost by my relatively diasspointing success at the higher secondary examination.
How nicely the faculty had organised the instructions for different papers. Tuhinangshu Babu meticuously took us through the entire micro-economics, except welfare economics, in the traditional way through diagrams and charts. Prof Roy took us through the same micro economics including welfare economics using only mathematics parallely. It was getting the lerssons done twice for most of micro-economics. It was a treat to watch the professor explaning the use of calculus and theory of equations to classmates who did not have the required mathematical background. Prof Roy also taught us the entire paper on Statistics using two different books for theory and one book for solving problems. Prof Diresh Bhattacharyya, the Head of the Department of Economics covered Indian econmy and its problems. Prof Nabendu Sen also covered the Indian economic problems from a separete, independent perspective. The history of economic development of four countries were covered by three teachers. Amalendu Babu who dealth with the economic history of United Kingdom spent 50% of his classes on the Industrial Revolution itself: I culd visualize the pastures and the coal miners and the miners deplorable working conditions ( 12 years later I would be working as a the Corporate Planner in a huge coal company).
The three years of groundwork in elementary economics at the higher secondary school was now on a long-distance discovery flight operated by the expert scientific crew of brilliant teachers who assembled at the college for those two years, as if only for my benefit.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Two literatures Equal one Science: My Unfolding Voyage 38
The Bengali educationists responsible for our undergraduate instruction had thought that if one were to study Bachelor of Science, one must learn at least three science subjects: the usual combinations were physics, chemistry and mathematics or Biology or something. Of the three subjects chosen, one could be a major one with eight papers while the other two would be minors of three papers each. They were not required to learn literature or language any longer now: either they had no use of literature or they are presumed to be adequately strong in literature. However, if one were to study Bachelor of Arts, one must get more exposure to English and Bengal literature. So, he may study one honors /major subject like Economics of 8 papers, a minor subject, say Mathematics, of 3 papers as well as English and Bengali literature. Probably, the educationist had reckoned that such students were weak in literature or needed literature exposure to understand their major or minor subjects like economics, mathematics, geography, history, political science, etc. Even if one is majoring in English or Bengali, you had still to take the common literature courses. But since one was studying English and Bengali literature, one would not need to study a third minor subject as the science students had to do. It was an equivalence of two literature with one science subject.
But if one was majoring in Economics as I had done, it was clear to me that I needed only to attend 70% of the literature classes and need not study these subjects exceot for two-three days before the examinations in these subjects began at the end of the two year. Actually if you are majoring in a subject, you had very little time to study any other thing, least literature. Moreover, it was easy to find out that. your knowledge of English and Bengali at the higher secondary level was adequate enough to score a pass in these literature examinations if you could study the books, preferably, made-easy kind of note books, for about 15 to 20 hours over a period of two days before you sit for the examinations. That is exactly the strategy I and many of classmates had followed. There were to be questions that would call for writing essays and dealing with history of Bengali literature which we had covered at the higher secondary level. And, we were successful with our strategy. I had secured more than 50% of the marks in the literature final examinations at the end of the second year
Mathematics as a minor however needed some attention. There were three papers of 100 marks each: one for Differential and Integral Calculus, the second for Algebgra ( vectors, matrices, theory of equations etc) and geometry. These two papers were to be cleared at the end of second year. The third paper covered statics, dynamics and astrology to be studied during and cleared at the end of the third year of the Bachelor of Arts program. Except for geometry that I did not enjoy much, the rest of the first two papers I had to learrn to some extent any way for my Economics major and future pursuit of Masters' program in Economics. But dealing with the 4 Economics major papers in the first two years was a real tough job, unless you had no other interest in life. So, time and effort on mathematics minor papers had to remain limited. This strategy however proved risky for some of my classmates who failed in this subject while scoring high in the Economics major and had to reappear for Mathematics examinations.
The four papers in Economics major to be completed during the first two years (called Part I BA) were both interesting and and wide ranging. One paper covered Markets, Price & Distribution Theory (,or microeconomics including welfare economis). another paper aws entirely statistics covering descriptive statistics starting from survey, compilation. tabulation, measures of central tendency, disperpersion and skewness, correlation, regression analysis of variance, index numbers, statistical distribution and , Chi-square and t-tests of hypothesis and probabilty. The third paper was on Indian economic development and Indian economy in all its aspects. The fourth paper was on history of economic development of four countries: USA, UK, USSR and Japan. History still did not quite leave me: but this was a different kind of history - a form of empirical economics and the dates and names of the kings/ wariers and statesment were not important..
But if one was majoring in Economics as I had done, it was clear to me that I needed only to attend 70% of the literature classes and need not study these subjects exceot for two-three days before the examinations in these subjects began at the end of the two year. Actually if you are majoring in a subject, you had very little time to study any other thing, least literature. Moreover, it was easy to find out that. your knowledge of English and Bengali at the higher secondary level was adequate enough to score a pass in these literature examinations if you could study the books, preferably, made-easy kind of note books, for about 15 to 20 hours over a period of two days before you sit for the examinations. That is exactly the strategy I and many of classmates had followed. There were to be questions that would call for writing essays and dealing with history of Bengali literature which we had covered at the higher secondary level. And, we were successful with our strategy. I had secured more than 50% of the marks in the literature final examinations at the end of the second year
Mathematics as a minor however needed some attention. There were three papers of 100 marks each: one for Differential and Integral Calculus, the second for Algebgra ( vectors, matrices, theory of equations etc) and geometry. These two papers were to be cleared at the end of second year. The third paper covered statics, dynamics and astrology to be studied during and cleared at the end of the third year of the Bachelor of Arts program. Except for geometry that I did not enjoy much, the rest of the first two papers I had to learrn to some extent any way for my Economics major and future pursuit of Masters' program in Economics. But dealing with the 4 Economics major papers in the first two years was a real tough job, unless you had no other interest in life. So, time and effort on mathematics minor papers had to remain limited. This strategy however proved risky for some of my classmates who failed in this subject while scoring high in the Economics major and had to reappear for Mathematics examinations.
The four papers in Economics major to be completed during the first two years (called Part I BA) were both interesting and and wide ranging. One paper covered Markets, Price & Distribution Theory (,or microeconomics including welfare economis). another paper aws entirely statistics covering descriptive statistics starting from survey, compilation. tabulation, measures of central tendency, disperpersion and skewness, correlation, regression analysis of variance, index numbers, statistical distribution and , Chi-square and t-tests of hypothesis and probabilty. The third paper was on Indian economic development and Indian economy in all its aspects. The fourth paper was on history of economic development of four countries: USA, UK, USSR and Japan. History still did not quite leave me: but this was a different kind of history - a form of empirical economics and the dates and names of the kings/ wariers and statesment were not important..
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