Lament of a student

I received this mail recently from a student of maths. If this is what a student feels, we teachers have a lot to think about.


partha



QUOTE //**
Dear Sir,

I am third year undergraduate student at Dept of Mathematics, IIT KGP. And the first thing I would like to say is that the Department Sucks!
I apologize for the language but this is the best I can do considering the enormous amount of frustration I have right now.

I love maths (mainly pure maths) and I am pretty good at it, well at least good enough to understand and appreciate the beauty and depth of this subject. I was up all night going through the awesome library of math books that I have created at my room, solving some olympiad problems and now I'll sleep till the evening missing all my lectures. Is it the right thing to do? Well if the "professors" who teach us maths have no love for the subject or teaching then I think that it is. And I even have real doubts about the competence of some profs as well. Ask them a problem and they'll fumble and they'll ask for some time till the next class and even then it seems like they just mugged up a solution.

It's pathetic! I want to complain, I want to shout at the administration, at the profs, abuse them! But I can't, because I fear they'll ruin my only chance of escape - going for a PhD in maths at a better place, a place where the people teach because they love teaching and because they are good at it.

I am sorry for bothering you with this mail, but after reading your article I felt that you are one of those people who can understand my frustration and I felt like venting.

**// UNQUOTE

The article which provoked the above mail was here originally ::

http://www.freewebs.com/profpartha/publications/futile.pdf

The above article is now at ::

https://drpartha.org.in/publications/futile.pdf

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