Welcome to higher education! If you want to be successful here you need
to know a few things about how this place works. One of the main things
you need to know is the difference between the instructors you will have
here and those you had before. Let me take a few minutes to explain
this to you.
First, I am your professor, not your teacher. There is a difference. Up
to now your instruction has been in the hands of teachers, and a
teacher’s job is to make sure that you learn. Teachers are evaluated on
the basis of learning outcomes, generally as measured by standardized
tests. If you don’t learn, then your teacher is blamed. However, things
are very different for a university professor. It is no part of my job
to make you learn. At university, learning is your job — and yours
alone. My job is to lead you to the fountain of knowledge. Whether you
drink deeply or only gargle is entirely up to you.
In school your education was basically a test-preparation service.
Your teachers were not allowed to teach, but were required to focus on
preparing you for those all-important standardized tests. Though it
galls ideologues, we university professors still enjoy a large degree of
academic freedom. That means that the content and format of your
courses is still mostly under your professor’s control, and the format
will probably include a good bit of lecture, some discussion and little
or no test preparation.
When you go to a university, you are in a sense going to another
country, one with a different culture and different values. I have come
to realize that the biggest gap between you and me is a cultural
difference. I have absorbed deeply the norms and values of an ancient
academic culture and they are now a part of me. You, on the other hand,
come to my classes fresh from a culture with different values, one that
finds academic ways strange and hard to understand.
Mrinal Paliwal
Assistant Professor
Sanskriti University
Chhata- Mathura
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