Teachers in twenties play professor & pal for students

Sharmila Ganesan-Ram | TNN

Mumbai: Studying animal behaviour is not the only reason zoology professor Conrad Cabral allows his students to eat in the classroom and at times raise a racket. For Cabral, who completed his MA in zoology two years ago, these are liberties that lead to evolution. Perhaps that’s why, after a particularly exhausting lab session, the 29-year-old brings out his laptop to play computer games with the boys, discusses Britney Spears with the girls and occasionally accompanies the bunch to the nearby burger joint.

To his students, Cabral, who walks into St Xavier’s College in jeans and T-shirt, is as much professor as friend, for the generation gap is negligible. This dual role is characteristic of all who belong to the small but significant population of teachers in their twenties. While more elderly professors are treated like parent-figures, younger teachers are thought of as siblings or friends. “In class, I command respect. Outside, I am their buddy,’’ says Cabral, who interacts with his students on SMS, email and blogs.

Some senior teachers may turn up their nose at his lenient ways, but Cabral, who uses powerpoint presentations in most lectures because “I can’t draw’’, has other twenty-somethings for company. These teachers don’t demand pin-drop silence or subject students to fiery lectures if they are late.

“If a lecture of mine is boring, students don’t mind telling me so,’’ says 29-yearold Deepak Mathew, professor of psychology at Wilson College. When he joined in 2005, Mathew was fresh out of college and didn’t want to appear strict to students. So, “I went to the opposite extreme. I wouldn’t pull them up for
not paying attention,’’ he recalls. Two years later, he found the middle path. “Now they call me a taskmaster,’’ says Mathew, whose success stories include a dyslexic student initially reprimanded by many for choosing psychology. “She was among the top five students in that batch,’’ recalls Mathew.

Although not a lucrative profession, “there are many advantages like respect, job satisfaction and timings,’’ says 21-year-old Anushi Chaturvedi, who has just completed her first term (six months) as visiting faculty for Ruia’s media programme. For her subject, ‘Features and opinion’, Chaturvedi subscribed to online newsletters and encouraged students to analyse and compare stories. If they didn’t submit assignments on time, students would flood her inbox with apologetic SMSes. Chaturvedi, who will shortly fly to the UK to study journalism, says being almost the same age dissolves inhibitions. “Once, we had a good laugh over a daily sex advisory column,’’ she recalls.

Speaking the language of the youth, “Hinglish or other language cocktails’’, helps. “If they see somebody who talks, dresses and looks like them and is more in tune with their experiences, the ice is easier to break,’’ says Gauri Sarda, psychology lecturer at SNDT, Matunga. She uses modern examples like the Queer Azadi march, the MTV Roadies show and the latest nail-polish ad to talk about how media influences behaviour. Since, “I am perceived as a single woman who may have similar problems,’’ says Sarda, students freely broach subjects like ex-boyfriends without fear of being judged.

Although the fear of being taken for granted haunts this tribe, it isn’t all that easy to pull the wool over their young eyes. One boy in 24-year-old Suman Kalra’s class of media students constantly listened to music on his I-pod. “One day I fired the hell out of him,’’ she recalls. Another time, in reply to a student who directly copied from the internet for a project on the East India Company, Kalra emailed him a PDF document of the internet page. “You have to draw the line somewhere,’’ she says.

Sometimes, the line is automatically drawn. When 29-year-old Saravanan Vijaykumar, who joined the faculty of IIT-B three months ago, plays basketball, students ask him “Which year?’’ After he clarifies, “The ball always comes to me.’’

Psychology professor Deepak Mathew (right) with his students