And with that, the simple looking man closed his moleskin diary, that he had in front of him and stepped down the dias. He was an Indian Nobel Laureate - physiology and medicine - but like I cared. All I cared about at the moment, was perhaps, to sit next to the girl on the other side of the aisle. She was surely the most beautiful girl in the whole auditorium. And she surely hadn't blinked in the last 90 minutes of the quasi-lectured speech unlike me.
Yes, if I was ever the right kind of teacher, I'd too have said everything inspiring about science - just like the Nobel Laureate - to a classroom of 200 sleep-induced and withdrawn young prepubescent minds.But alas, that wasn't supposed to be. Because, left to my methods, I found myself provide quirky examples for the sake of elucidation of certain molecular biological laboratory concepts, such as:"Imagine you want to murder someone. You want to do it with a knife. Why a knife? Well, because knives are slow and painful and you can see the fear in your enemy's eyes as life slowly drains away.." (Here I paused, to give theatrics a chance) "..but then I go and hide away all your knives! You come into the room to face the person you want to kill. But suddenly you can't kill them because I took away your only weapon!" I paused, to let them try to figure it out a little by themselves before I give them the final conclusion of the elaborate example - "that's what EDTA does. It takes away the cation cofactors that the nuclease needs to cleave the DNA!"One of my students, now wide awake and with a sense of obvious alarm on his face, raised his hands to ask:"Can we not kill with guns?""No" said I."Why?" he persisted with his line of enquiry."Because they aren't cool. Haven't you watched The Dark Knight?""Umm.. Okay.. I just think you have the craziest sense of humor..""Ignore!" I say with a smile.I didn't disagree. Because like a slow realization, it did occur to me to be an absolutely wacky example to give. But then, I am quite the (how I want to use the phrase 'devil may care' right now) go-with-the-flow kind of person in a classroom. I would rather understand a concept clearly, than waiting for it to be getting diluted by political translations.
The first class that I teach on Wednesday late in the evening consists largely of Freshman students. For every question I ask them that's in reference to the technicality of the experimental design - "Why do we do this step?" or "What follows after this step?" - I get the seemingly omni-applicable and nonsensical phrase "to read the DNA!"You can't entirely blame them. They're always over-excited about it, which is good for a 6 PM class!But it's sad for my Thursday afternoon class, which is mostly Senior students who have declared Biology as their major. They usually face the brunt of all my poor jokes, the levels of which has been brought way down their standards by the Wednesday class. Like that other day when we had to be working with burners, I'd look at everyone and say "Remove your latex gloves" and then I turn to the bench where only guys sit, and say "You guys, tie up all your hair in a ponytail!" They stared at me for a couple minutes.. one of them even hung his jaw, till I pointed out that I was just joking.Among other stories, the person who takes orders at Starbucks got my name right for the first time in the history of my life, or that of Starbucks, or that of coffee. He accurately wrote
'Deep' instead of the usual 'Beep' and 'Deeb'. I was beaming at him as I waited for my hot chocolate. After a while, I hear a beautiful girl call on the PA: "One grande hot chocolate for Deer!"Maybe she got confused by the horns - or antlers - on top of my head. And if you consider the amount of red I got on the face after being called Deer, I'm lucky not to have been called Rudolf, the reindeer! Obviously, the guy who calls me Dean, is getting all his extra-points deducted if he doesn't get it right by the end of this semester.The best thing about teaching is all the grading.I got amazing otherworldly answers in the quiz for enzyme kinetics: supposedly, E for Enzyme, S for 'Substraight' (because he's not a queer) and P for Phosphorous. Because apparently you are an alchemist. Another fun answer was the various names they got for the word plasmid - platoons, pyramids, plasmado and platanoids. Where do these guys go, when they name cyclones in South Asia?! In the class, studying Osmosis and Diffusion, quite a lot of the students, upon asked 'Why does the water move inside the egg?', responds with "Well the egg wished to get some water inside, so.."
The best answer though, is the name one student have for an Erlenmeyer flask. He named it, the 'Eisenhower beaker!'
Grading is so much fun that Ping Li, the post doc in my previous lab, used to come look for the source of uncontrollable giggling in the office every single time. But then don't get me wrong, that is also what most of the TAs hate to do! And why not? It takes up most of your weekend. It demands attention even when serious lab work is kept pending. But not for me. Why you ask? Good question. Well, first it provides you all kinds of amazingly thought of answers! The kind that you thought exists only on Internet memes. And second, it gives a kind of a false sense of power. Their lives depend on the mercy of your sense of appreciation of weather.Needless to say, my summer semester students are totally doomed!