Teacherpreneur - the bridge to entrepreneurship

It is rather a mixed experience to be a teacher.

On the one side, there are many great stories of considering teaching as a noble profession and how it transforms students. a teacher being given a more important position than a parent. good incidents are always there.

on the other side, there are so many criticisms. the height of criticism is from Bernard Shaw.  "a person who knows what to do will go ahead and do it. a person who does not know what to do will go ahead and teach". can we ask for a better criticism than this?

May be we can reason out from the famous symbol of yin and yang.
                                                             

When there is total darkness, lights starts to fill. and when there is only light, darkness starts to engulf. An amazing graphic representation of a profound concept.

In the days of guru's, the guru was an expert. expert in every sense or at least to the local community. naturally the respect from society and eventually from the students. There are only 2 choices. learn from the guru by what ever means. some how earn the good will of the guru. the other choice is to self-learn.

Some guru's tend to misuse this privilege and that leads to people without expertise to enter this forte.

A person with expertise will generally have more or less committed his/her life for the cause. for people who do not commit their life, it is just a means of life. quality slowly fades away.

Then comes the books. books in printed format slowly throws away the need for expertise. Students and society look for people having access to books. books that are neither affordable nor reachable. The hay days of people without expertise.

So, how does a common man identify or evaluate a good teacher. This leads to institutionalization of education. At least a community and a well defined system can bring in some discipline and away with pretenders.

Even this cant for long. Now, the community or the institution gets an upper hand. commercialization of education sets in.

Once again evolution takes over. What you sow is what you harvest. of course it happens across generation. The holy grail of internet steps in.

With the advent of internet, the need for books are no more relevant and eventually the relevance of a teacher. a teacher without expertise in this context. This leads to lack of trust in institutionalization of education.

Going by the trend and applying yin and yang philosophy, we may predict that the days of guru are in the offing.

The likes of Sal Khan (khan academy), vsauce, veritasium, engineering made simple, brian douglas and many more. In such an institutionalized world, individuals are taking center stage. unbelievable.

Add to this sugata mitra's grandma pedagogy. just keep saying "i never knew how to do that". Just motivation.

The only difference is that the gurus of early days where local celebrities but now the gurus are global celebrities.

A teacher of today has to aspire to be a global guru.

And what happens to educational institutions. let us compare an industry and educational institution. Apart from buildings, people with different skills sets, machines etc, there seems to be only one differentiation.

It is just a matter of survival. Industry has a product and strives to keep the secrets. Educational institution has the objective of sharing knowledge and tries to keep it open.

May be a balanced approach would be for educational institutions to create prototypes or proof of concepts and industry may focus on commercialization. May be that is the bridge. The bridge that helps students to cross over to employment in the respective industry. Better still cross over to the adventurous land of entrepreneurship.

So, a modern day teacher should be capable enough to interact with the industry, build a bridge and get the students to know that there are bridges across, leading to the land of opportunities. Hence the name teacherpreneur.

To the preneur list of entrepreneur, technopreneur and edupreneur, we have managed to add studentpreneur and now teacherpreneur.

Evolution takes over again......

The story of a Tag Line

Aatrral Academy

         - The temple of acceleration

The standard procedure in a starting is a company is to have 3 things. A name for the institution, A tag line and a logo.

The tag line and logo are not mandatory. However, once in a while, someone asks for them and we have to have a convincing reason for not having it too.

The company name. we need to have one and should be unique for the purpose of government registration. Apart from being unique, it is good if it can convey the message of our business.

Aatrral Academy. We have a name. Aatrral meaning Energy in Tamil language. Academy goes with out saying. There comes my personal experience that "Every one is unique" and has a "potential". So, the objective of our institution is facilitate our members inherent potential (energy) or assist them to find theirs (if they have not found it yet).

On to the tagline, we began with "Identify Potential. Create Value" . This again extends the scope of our offering to learning, research or entrepreneurship. My strong belief is that these three are inseparable. A purpose driven learning would lead to value creation for the individual in terms of monetary and societal standing.

Time went on. close to two years. Over this period we have been into science history. Rather evolution of science. During the exploration it occurred that the core concept in science is acceleration and that is the reason why Newton-Apple story has become so famous. It is usual for us to remember the story and forget the concept. Thanks to Prof shankar Ramamurthi's video lectures from Yale. He goes on to emphasize that force is the central concept of science. once we understand that, most of science will be easy. The part that does not fit into the most being quantum mechanics.

There is the clue. but force again was having two concepts. Mass and acceleration.

In the course of writing an article on acceleration, it suddenly occurred, why is that newton had to wait for the apple to fall?

The possible answer. Out of all the concepts, when we start approaching science with acceleration as the central theme, the whole puzzle seems to fit in. That is the story of acceleration in the tag line.

And accelerator is another word used in the entrepreneurship parlance. so, we get a common word that signifies both.

We would have heard, work is work ship. To worship we go a temple. Temple also stands to represent the point of focus.

That's the story behind the tagline "The temple of acceleration" .

So, we have a name and tag line. What about the logo?

Have engaged an expert to come out with a logo based on the following inputs.

- Newton says acceleration is due to a force (and that is due to mass)

- Einstein says the that is fine, but force itself manifests as a space-time curvature

- The Galileo's Law of Inertia states "unless there is an acceleration, the body remains at rest or in uniform velocity motion"

- Philosophically speaking, change is the only thing that is constant. Change requires acceleration and hence acceleration becomes the key.

The logo is expected have a representation of space-time, the focal point and may be a spice of spirituality.

Giving the company a name took close to a week. The tag line took close to 2 years. Lets wait for the Logo. Sometimes even waiting for something is an enjoyable experience. 

Science is simpler than psychology

It is so common to hear from students and parents that "i am not good in science. so am choosing arts, commerce, visual communication etc., as a career option"

Too good to be true. not really. lets argue.

The argument goes like this.



Scene 1: That is our friend Hachi from the famous Hachiko movie.



- Can we predict which way will our friend go? To the left, to the right or just turn around and walk back. There may be one too many reasons for our friend to choose an option. It gets almost unpredictable.




Scene 2: The financial market. Can we predict which way would it go?

Scene 3: Global economy. How is the currency value decided?









Scene 4: How about an art something like this. This one of Escher's.

All these scenes above require very high level of skills. Skills like group theory, statistics, probability and more importantly creativity. Add to this the regime of chaos, fractals and self-organizing systems. Mind boggling.


Compare this with science.



Science deals with predictions of motion of inanimate objects. They don't think on their own. All we requires is the concept of acceleration and and a few mathematical tools like arithmetic, geometry and calculus.

With the advent of simulation software's, things have got much simpler.



So, can we say science is simpler than psychology?

A pit stop and road map

How far have we traveled? and Where are we going?

"Journey is more important that the Destination"

                                               Experience parabolic motion in 24 seconds

We began with acceleration, added few words to our physics vocabulary like displacement, velocity, power, rest and also took a peek at the concept of Field and Flux. We also transgressed into the topics on electricity and a bit on Planck;s constant, dealing with Energy.

A word on our overall approach.

Classical mechanics seems to be the foundation for comprehending subjects like electricity, magnetism, heat, sound etc. Why? All of these are a study of motion of a particle, rigid body, molecule/atom (heat and temperature), electron (electricity) or electron spin (magnetism). 

A strong understanding of motion (translation, rotation, wave and quantum) are built on top of the concepts of displacement, velocity, force, field, energy and power.  In the due course, i came to understand that "acceleration" is the key.  once we comprehend acceleration, all other concepts seem to become simple. May be reason why apple-newton story became such a legend.

Though we have identified acceleration as the core concept and study of motion will enable us to comprehend other subjects, there is one more challenge. The challenge is that each individual approaches a subject from a different perspective and also every concept would require a different approach.

Keeping this in mind, our articles will have one or more of the following approaches.

• Start with an application and introduce the underlying physics vocabulary.
• Provide precise explanations. for ex. distance is used in geometry which considers only the length.Whereas displacement should take time interval into account. displacement as a shortest distance is not sufficient.
• Use evolution based approach for topics that are considered to be complex

If you have come this far and find the journey to be interesting, let us move forward. we shall have a discussion on mass, weight and force. These are quite confusing for most of us. let us make an attempt.

In a few more articles we will be discussing on collisions, moment, work and energy. To these we will be linking the concept of power. We are still dealing with one dimensional motion. Just to keep things simple.

With this lets us reflect upon the contents we learned and summarize on the concepts of equilibrium and conservation. These are 2 important tools of science.
Equilibrium: Force, Moment
Conservation: Mass, Momentum, Energy

Till this stage, we were dealing with a simple object like ball. We call it simple because, it is geometrically symmetric and considered to be made of the same material. We considered all of the mass of ball to be concentrated at a single point. Hence, we did not have to bother about shape and size of the object. We just needed to know what is the mass of the object?. Since we have assumed something, we shall give it a word particle and add it to our vocabulary.

But real world objects are need not be symmetric. so we need to get to the concept of center of mass, center of gravity and moment of inertia. We are entering into the regime of rigid bodies. For rigid bodies we will have to consider the shape and hence the mass distribution into account.

Subsequently, we shall get into the regime of 2 dimensional motions. The parabolic and circular motions.

Beyond this the road gets a bit rough but interesting and adventurous. We will be getting into the lands of potential energy, electricity, magnetism etc . The adventure requires a few tools. so, we will be taking a little detour into vectors, complex numbers and calculus.

During the adventures journey, we may have a few short breaks and get to know astronomy, sound, optics and heat.

If we have crossed this far, we will be in a position to enjoy the panorama of space-time curvatures and quantum mechanics.