Cogito Ergo Sum

I am taking a course i.e. Signals and Systems in the Fast Track Semester. This is a special feature of autonomous and deemed engineering institutes. It is offered during the vacation following the even semester. It is for the failed students to pass and others to improve their grades if they want. It has a set of rules for failed students. A students can not take more than 16 credits (means roughly 4 theories of 4 credits each or 3 theories+2 labs of 2 credits each) in a fast track semester. To get promoted to the next semester, a student should have minimum CGPA of 5.0 and less than 5 subjects to carry.

In my subject there are 4 students. All are F grade cases. The semester is for 6 weeks. Each week has 4 slots for my subject and a slot is of 2 hours duration. Yesterday afternoon was the first class. I had no clue how it would be, but at the end of the class I was more than happy with the quality of the students. I was amazed when upon being offered a break at 3:15pm, they did not take it. They worked out the concepts, they seemed to follow what I was talking. It was more of an interactive session. I gave them homework. If they do it and show in the next class, that's my first success of the fast track semester.

When I was offered this course to teach, I accepted without hesitation for 3 reasons:

1) I was very comfortable with the subject,

2) In the next regular semester I am going to teach Digital Signal Processing and brushing up Signals & Systems fundamentals would help a lot, and

3) I wanted to check my effectiveness in teaching the "so called dull" students.

Here I've put "so called dull" in quotes because, I think these "dull" students are really not "dull". They would've failed due to other reasons like laziness to study, health problems, getting tensed and messing up in the examination etc. Hence the first thing that I did was to ask them what did they think was their primary reason for failure. It's easy to give personal attention when the number of students is less. But in some subjects, especially the first year subjects, the number is as high as 50 or 100. That is because first year is common irrespective of the branch.

I told each of them to write down their target grade on the first page of their notebook and sign it. That's like a promise made to themselves and me. They can modify it to set a better target, but they are not allowed to lower it during the semester. We are not aiming at just passing, but on learning and passing.

They all have good sense of humor. They are nice company to be with. For me, not even a minute seemed boring, don't know for them whether it was the same. Let's comment more in the August second week, when the classes end. So long then.