Mayeesha Tahsin's Posts
First teaching experience!
As a student, I was always very discriminating about the school teachers that taught me. I used to analyze their personality and their teaching style,constantly thinking how might they improve. I never liked my school teachers that much. My only prayer was that they wouldn't get in the way of my learning.
I used to seat at the front left or front right corner where the seat always showed "teachers' pet" I guess. I had some friends who would constantly answer teachers questions. But teachers had to ask me to make me talk. Two of my teachers tried really hard to make me laugh. I was the most silent student of the class always. But I had some good qualities going on my side such as :
--always getting 'really good' marks.
--generally respected and well liked by my other classmates.
--being somewhat enigmatic. Basically they wanted to figure out why someone as silent as me would be well liked by my class mates.
They knew that I didn't initially respect most of them. But the one's that actually gained respect from me knew that was totally from the heart. The opposite happened too. Some teachers challenged me a lot to grow.
There was this organic chemistry teacher Sabiha, who was feared by everyone else because she was so intimidating in the classroom. I still remember her because she was extremely beautiful and magnetic compared to other teachers. She told me that I was going 'soft' in front of other 40 students and that I was turning really arrogant and thinking I'm always going to get good grades even if I don't work hard once when I was starting grade 12. She was right. I had to work really hard to do well in her class.
But both of us knew she was not talking about doing well in chemistry when she was targeting my behavior patterns. She wanted to ensure that I learn that there's always a next level in everything. When I left high school, all the other students were paying respect to all the other teachers because they found her more intimidating, but I went to her because we both knew we are too alike to ignore it.
There was this physics teacher named Bithi, she was the quirky teacher in my high school. Every single time we would fail to understand some physics concept, she would lament that she feels like that she wants to jump out of the window and die after watching this humiliation of physics by us students. Our class at the 10th floor/15th floor of the building. She just loved me. Physics was my strongest subject by far because of her. I really wanted to impress her all the time, in every single question or the exam papers.
She was not an ambitious person, rather someone with a great heart and people just loved her like me. I think all of us students wanted to make sure that she wouldn't jump out of the window by learning physics properly. I just loved her too. She taught me for 1 year but even after that I would go hanging around in her classes and tutorials because I was always so impressed by her.
When I left high school she told me, "Well you are going now and teachers have to give something to their students when they leave, but I don't have anything with me now, so take this apple" and gave me this green apple. I just left the room while eating the apple. It was fun. She wanted to signal that it's okay to be quirky even if you are interested in heavily technical subjects. Study fields don't discriminate among people who are nerds and the one's who are not. It just demands results.
Another of her motto was : " Some people get things in 10 hours, some people get things in 2 hours. People want to see results, they don't want to see how much effort you gave. So if you study for 1 hour and get the same result as other people, it's fine if you do something you like in the resulting 9 hours. But if someone has to study for 9 hours and get the same result, there's not much point in feeling bad over it. It's your results that will bring you more resources and stuff you like, so measure what matters ".
I liked her because she could encourage weaker students while acknowledging the existent of brighter people. She made us more effort driven even though she talked about results. It was a subtle maneuver but it worked. It made both sides of the table happy.
My most mismatched teacher was probably in my school around grade 8-10 named Sanjay. He was extremely nit-picky, discriminating, ethical type of pro-vegan person who expected everything to go in a methodical, data-driven, organized, flawless way. He was a very good teacher in what he did. He was structured so he was really good in teaching science related subjects and maths. He would also spend hours over how to give us the intuition about some subjects and teach us learning strategies. He was very fair and moral.
I was more of a fast mover, intuitive, fun seeking sort of learner who needed lots of structure in the beginning but would do better in the structure-less environments after what I've learnt had been mastered. I had no problem with breaking rules ever. He noticed it and constantly criticized it. I just got more frustrated with him over time instead of improving. He was just too rigid, inflexible compared to my extremely flexible ways.
Other students always wanted to impress him. I had subtle personality conflicts with him in the beginning but later it went better after we had a better sense of the teaching and learning styles. I had another nemesis in my school back then, Sharmin. She was basically just greedy for acknowledgement from him and other teachers. Man, that made my life hell in school. Ever wondered how does it feel like to seat beside Hermione Granger? Well I tolerated it for two whole year. Every single time anyone would ask one question, her hand would just shot up and she would totally rote memorize the answer most of the time. She had good memory. She's in medical school now.
Point is that I was totally jealous of her, I wanted to get better than her in what she did and she was my best friend who spent the most time with me. So naturally I was competing for attention from teachers with her. Overtime I got better and now our path is so different that there's no competition anymore. I've drifted and now I invest more time and effort in getting unique skills instead of competing with other people.
Other students were also much better than me in the beginning but my talent was in ''ability to learn fast'' unlike other students who were just better in other abilities like : being goal oriented, disciplined, structured, energetic, intellectual etc.
But my talent was in 'going to synthesis' faster than other students even if initially I was basically slow, unstructured, a high level procrastinator, fearful of most people, nervous, scatter-brained,amoral basically lacking in most qualities expected from someone of my age back then. I've lots of bad qualities, but not prioritizing learning isn't one of them.
He constantly praised me by saying," Mayeesha knows less than most of you and in some cases she knows exactly as much as you guys, but it's not her depth of knowledge that's interesting about her, rather her ability to put that knowledge to use is what's interesting about her. "
I think that's basically one of the best my best descriptions until now. Other students used to stay at the top of the class, what's being taught etc all the time. I was just trying to get by, everyone knew it, but when it came to performance evaluation I was getting similar marks as them despite studying less. And it was not some intellectual feat either, I had to work hard to actually get better marks than them. But ever since then my interest is in doing more with less resources whenever I can.
I respected him because he showed respect and had grown liking to me even after me being totally different from him and lacking in almost all the qualities that he has. I'm much better in structure and organization now though, I wonder how he would react if he saw me now.
Fast forward a few years. I've changed a lot. I don't care much about grades anymore. I'm more application driven than before. I want to get better in technical and quantitative skills and mostly focus on high impact real life problems. I'm interested in entrepreneurship too. I'm interested in finishing long open ended research or high impact projects. I'm preparing for getting internships. I'm also trying to get a handle on understanding exactly what kind of problems in real life will need my natural advantages. I'm also interested in working at some companies for a while and getting transferred to a better university. I have completely different outlook on life and completely different relationship to my family and friends now.
Older friends have drifted. My family structure has become different. Cousins are all gone. I don't find anything to talk about to my cousins anymore. I'm a stranger to them and they are strangers to me. I used to seek A+ back then, right now I'm looking to see how to get more impact in what I do. I'm trying to find out how to get better in acquiring skills, putting those skills to better uses, how to be efficient in studying so that I can spend time on other activities etc. I'm also much better in making friends, developing relationships with older people etc.
I just ran my first teaching workshop, developed an entire 4 day curriculum for running that(I'll write later about why and how the stuff was done and I'm sure people would love hearing the story). My students loved me. I also feel confident about running more workshops later in other schools or with other students.
But I was really wondering if there was some student like me in the workshop who were also anti-authority or not. And it did seem some of them were somewhat like me and I'll probably meet more of my type of students later in my life, but I wonder if they understood that I'm one of the few people left who truly understands what is it like to be a beginner, simply because I always value doing stuff that I've no initial idea about and slowly getting better at it.
I think that's why the students liked me so much despite knowing that I've zero idea about running workshops and that's also the reason my future conference or seminar colleagues will also like me. Unlike most of the people, I truly try to prioritize making a great experience for the people who are beginners. The other guy working with me knew how to 'teach' people, but I knew how to 'learn' with them.
I used to seat at the front left or front right corner where the seat always showed "teachers' pet" I guess. I had some friends who would constantly answer teachers questions. But teachers had to ask me to make me talk. Two of my teachers tried really hard to make me laugh. I was the most silent student of the class always. But I had some good qualities going on my side such as :
--always getting 'really good' marks.
--generally respected and well liked by my other classmates.
--being somewhat enigmatic. Basically they wanted to figure out why someone as silent as me would be well liked by my class mates.
They knew that I didn't initially respect most of them. But the one's that actually gained respect from me knew that was totally from the heart. The opposite happened too. Some teachers challenged me a lot to grow.
There was this organic chemistry teacher Sabiha, who was feared by everyone else because she was so intimidating in the classroom. I still remember her because she was extremely beautiful and magnetic compared to other teachers. She told me that I was going 'soft' in front of other 40 students and that I was turning really arrogant and thinking I'm always going to get good grades even if I don't work hard once when I was starting grade 12. She was right. I had to work really hard to do well in her class.
But both of us knew she was not talking about doing well in chemistry when she was targeting my behavior patterns. She wanted to ensure that I learn that there's always a next level in everything. When I left high school, all the other students were paying respect to all the other teachers because they found her more intimidating, but I went to her because we both knew we are too alike to ignore it.
There was this physics teacher named Bithi, she was the quirky teacher in my high school. Every single time we would fail to understand some physics concept, she would lament that she feels like that she wants to jump out of the window and die after watching this humiliation of physics by us students. Our class at the 10th floor/15th floor of the building. She just loved me. Physics was my strongest subject by far because of her. I really wanted to impress her all the time, in every single question or the exam papers.
She was not an ambitious person, rather someone with a great heart and people just loved her like me. I think all of us students wanted to make sure that she wouldn't jump out of the window by learning physics properly. I just loved her too. She taught me for 1 year but even after that I would go hanging around in her classes and tutorials because I was always so impressed by her.
When I left high school she told me, "Well you are going now and teachers have to give something to their students when they leave, but I don't have anything with me now, so take this apple" and gave me this green apple. I just left the room while eating the apple. It was fun. She wanted to signal that it's okay to be quirky even if you are interested in heavily technical subjects. Study fields don't discriminate among people who are nerds and the one's who are not. It just demands results.
Another of her motto was : " Some people get things in 10 hours, some people get things in 2 hours. People want to see results, they don't want to see how much effort you gave. So if you study for 1 hour and get the same result as other people, it's fine if you do something you like in the resulting 9 hours. But if someone has to study for 9 hours and get the same result, there's not much point in feeling bad over it. It's your results that will bring you more resources and stuff you like, so measure what matters ".
I liked her because she could encourage weaker students while acknowledging the existent of brighter people. She made us more effort driven even though she talked about results. It was a subtle maneuver but it worked. It made both sides of the table happy.
My most mismatched teacher was probably in my school around grade 8-10 named Sanjay. He was extremely nit-picky, discriminating, ethical type of pro-vegan person who expected everything to go in a methodical, data-driven, organized, flawless way. He was a very good teacher in what he did. He was structured so he was really good in teaching science related subjects and maths. He would also spend hours over how to give us the intuition about some subjects and teach us learning strategies. He was very fair and moral.
I was more of a fast mover, intuitive, fun seeking sort of learner who needed lots of structure in the beginning but would do better in the structure-less environments after what I've learnt had been mastered. I had no problem with breaking rules ever. He noticed it and constantly criticized it. I just got more frustrated with him over time instead of improving. He was just too rigid, inflexible compared to my extremely flexible ways.
Other students always wanted to impress him. I had subtle personality conflicts with him in the beginning but later it went better after we had a better sense of the teaching and learning styles. I had another nemesis in my school back then, Sharmin. She was basically just greedy for acknowledgement from him and other teachers. Man, that made my life hell in school. Ever wondered how does it feel like to seat beside Hermione Granger? Well I tolerated it for two whole year. Every single time anyone would ask one question, her hand would just shot up and she would totally rote memorize the answer most of the time. She had good memory. She's in medical school now.
Point is that I was totally jealous of her, I wanted to get better than her in what she did and she was my best friend who spent the most time with me. So naturally I was competing for attention from teachers with her. Overtime I got better and now our path is so different that there's no competition anymore. I've drifted and now I invest more time and effort in getting unique skills instead of competing with other people.
Other students were also much better than me in the beginning but my talent was in ''ability to learn fast'' unlike other students who were just better in other abilities like : being goal oriented, disciplined, structured, energetic, intellectual etc.
But my talent was in 'going to synthesis' faster than other students even if initially I was basically slow, unstructured, a high level procrastinator, fearful of most people, nervous, scatter-brained,amoral basically lacking in most qualities expected from someone of my age back then. I've lots of bad qualities, but not prioritizing learning isn't one of them.
He constantly praised me by saying," Mayeesha knows less than most of you and in some cases she knows exactly as much as you guys, but it's not her depth of knowledge that's interesting about her, rather her ability to put that knowledge to use is what's interesting about her. "
I think that's basically one of the best my best descriptions until now. Other students used to stay at the top of the class, what's being taught etc all the time. I was just trying to get by, everyone knew it, but when it came to performance evaluation I was getting similar marks as them despite studying less. And it was not some intellectual feat either, I had to work hard to actually get better marks than them. But ever since then my interest is in doing more with less resources whenever I can.
I respected him because he showed respect and had grown liking to me even after me being totally different from him and lacking in almost all the qualities that he has. I'm much better in structure and organization now though, I wonder how he would react if he saw me now.
Fast forward a few years. I've changed a lot. I don't care much about grades anymore. I'm more application driven than before. I want to get better in technical and quantitative skills and mostly focus on high impact real life problems. I'm interested in entrepreneurship too. I'm interested in finishing long open ended research or high impact projects. I'm preparing for getting internships. I'm also trying to get a handle on understanding exactly what kind of problems in real life will need my natural advantages. I'm also interested in working at some companies for a while and getting transferred to a better university. I have completely different outlook on life and completely different relationship to my family and friends now.
Older friends have drifted. My family structure has become different. Cousins are all gone. I don't find anything to talk about to my cousins anymore. I'm a stranger to them and they are strangers to me. I used to seek A+ back then, right now I'm looking to see how to get more impact in what I do. I'm trying to find out how to get better in acquiring skills, putting those skills to better uses, how to be efficient in studying so that I can spend time on other activities etc. I'm also much better in making friends, developing relationships with older people etc.
I just ran my first teaching workshop, developed an entire 4 day curriculum for running that(I'll write later about why and how the stuff was done and I'm sure people would love hearing the story). My students loved me. I also feel confident about running more workshops later in other schools or with other students.
But I was really wondering if there was some student like me in the workshop who were also anti-authority or not. And it did seem some of them were somewhat like me and I'll probably meet more of my type of students later in my life, but I wonder if they understood that I'm one of the few people left who truly understands what is it like to be a beginner, simply because I always value doing stuff that I've no initial idea about and slowly getting better at it.
I think that's why the students liked me so much despite knowing that I've zero idea about running workshops and that's also the reason my future conference or seminar colleagues will also like me. Unlike most of the people, I truly try to prioritize making a great experience for the people who are beginners. The other guy working with me knew how to 'teach' people, but I knew how to 'learn' with them.
