“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
I was waiting for my laptop to download the software named MiKTeX. It seemed to go on endlessly and my memories impelled me to revisit life….
Teaching has been one of the most gratifying experience for an academician. The classroom is a creative site where the teacher can connect with the students bearing numerous personalities. Teaching students in a face to face situation is said to usher joy, contentment and supreme gratification as no day is the same in a classroom. Each batch of students, each concept and each learning happens with a freshness and the experience is always brand new.
A good teacher has a unique quality of adapting to the environment and imbibing the environment in her teaching. For example, a Humanities faculty in the Management College imbibes Economics and Finance easily, the one in Performing Arts and Literature starts appreciating the Philosophy and Sociology of life and the one in the field of Science and Technology becomes objective and Innovative. The language that these teachers use changes accordingly.
Technology doesn’t remain hostile for the Humanities faculty in an Engineering college. One finds Ubuntu mounted on all the teaching screens instead of MS Office. A student knows complex codes but doesn’t know the basics of using a word document. Grammar, spellings, Coherence and Cohesion, Semantics and Lexical features are laborious to learn for these students making the faculty frightfully superior while they tackle the simple aspects in a complex way.
The lockdown owing to COVID 19 took the faculty members in India to the overwhelming use of technology. They began meeting their students on ZOOM and Google hangouts. They virtually visited the classroom and instructed the students to join the class ASAP with the code to attend lectures and to upload their assignments. They doodled Moodle, created with Canva and kindled Kahoot for tests and mock examination; and the teaching-learning began happening 24 hours instead of the normal 8 hours. Even though this left one with no time, innumerable universities and organisations were providing free online courses to keep up the sanity of the students. I was contemplating doing something new in literature when I came across the course ‘LaTeX ’, an initiative of IIT Bombay in collaboration with our college authorities.
I have often wondered at the mix of cases while one writes the names of these courses. The Dictionary defines ‘Latex’ in biology as a milky fluid found in many plants which exudes when the plant is cut and coagulates on exposure to the air. The latex of the rubber tree is the chief source of natural rubber. When I asked my son about ‘LaTeX ’ in Technology, he said it was a tool that helped in Scientific documentation especially in Research Papers and is pronounced as ‘La Tech’. It made me curious and I called the Computer Engineering faculty who was teaching this to the third-year students. She said that it was very easy and I could visit the Spoken tutorial and watch the videos and learn it at my pace. She sent a short video that showed how to visit the Spoken tutorial and access the videos.
She then asked me curiously, ‘What about Python, Ma’am?’
I was astonished, ‘ I haven’t seen it, was it visible in your area?’
She smiled and said, ‘Ma’am, it falls into my regime.’
I wondered about it and asked her in a whisper, ‘since when?’
She said, right from the beginning but now I am in charge of the Faculty Development Programme on Python
I almost let out a scream, ‘Is Python hunting, a Faculty Development Training? That’s amazing, we don’t have any greenery as such for a Python to visit us.’
She laughed and said, ‘Ma’am, Python, the Programming Language’.
I told her that I was happy with LaTeX and could not join any more of the courses for the strain of technology could cause a nervous breakdown.
When I Googled the site and went to the Spoken tutorial, it asked me to download MiKTeX. It sounded almost like the names of siblings. The MiKTeX download did not happen. When I peered deeply, it said the file was large and could take a few hours. I gave it a few days and then when I clicked it again, it said it would take some more time.
I left it and began with the tutorials. The second video was a friendly kind and taught a page layout, content writing spacing and many others…It also said we could learn it with MiKTeX or without it. This was puzzling but the group of three hundred faculty members who were enrolled for the course let out their voices on the WhatsApp Group asking whether MiKTeX should be 64 Bit or 32 Bit. The videos also asked us to use ‘Skim’ for letter writing, and then each instruction had a new technical term. I tried downloading MiKTeX of all the sizes and I am still waiting for MiKTeX to download.
The lockdown brought in the use of a series of Apps and software that were perhaps known but weren’t being operated with great zeal. I grew comfortable learning technology with the extension of the lockdown. I began using the online editor to study LaTeX. I began inviting my students to the virtual classroom and started sharing discussions on Zoom, Google Meet, hangouts and others. Twenty-five years back when Intel began its beginners' course on MS office for teachers we had wondered whether the technology would change our professional life. Twenty-five years later the COVID 19 lockdown has made technology substantial, it connects us to our students rapidly but there’s no fervour or joy in the teaching. It has speeded up life yet there’s fatigue and I have never felt that fetter that binds me to my students and hurls me into the world of teaching and learning.
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