How not to conduct an academic seminar. Part One

I remember the first “seminar” that I participated in. That was way back in 1980, when my University (the Central University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad) had one.They invited the outgoing MPhil students, hoping, I think, to get feedback and inputs from my classmates and me. I’m sure the other students (there were only four) pleased the faculty, but I took a different route. I was already a serving teacher (having joined my College in 1975), so I clearly had a head-start. I was 28 years old when the seminar was conducted, and a young man, at that age, has more things on his mind than mere academic excellence. I told my listeners that I was not up to any serious academic work; instead I had found a lucrative way to make money, by way of providing private tuitions. They were aghast, but I think I won the day with my practicality. In fact, just about that time, while my salary was a meagre Rs 2000, my monthly income from tuitions was almost three times that sum.

In College, seminars came and went, but I contributed sparsely. I was never the pushy, “in-your-face” kind of guy, so I listened inattentively to all the mushy scholarship being dished out. I couldn’t do anything to change the pattern, since I felt my time had not yet come. But when I defended my doctoral dissertation, I confidently declared: “I am the book!” I had the backing of my primary Guru, Dr Meenakshi Mukherjee, who told me, then, that I was embarking on a path-breaking voyage. You see, I had undertaken a sweeping search into the “identity” of the Anglo Indian in recent English fiction, and Dr Meenakshi Mukherjee acknowledged that it would be a pioneering study. It took me ten long years to be awarded the PhD, but it was worth it.

Unfortunately ( or fortunately, for my financial status), I relocated to Oman, where basic English was all that was required. At a seminar in Salalah, I made a case for teaching simplified grammar to non-native students, concentrating on the Present Tense (Simple and Progressive), the Past Tense (Simple and Progressive), and the Future Tense (using only “going to” in all cases). I was not received well, by some who still hadn’t mastered the grammar I was alluding to.

In my next College in Oman, in a small town called Shinas, I demonstrated how a simple text (it was a Robert Frost poem) can be transformed into an engaging grammar tutorial. The audience reacted with admiration, for I believe I had truly turned that session into a teaching-cum-learning experience. For your information, the very next year, I was shown the door. As the old saying goes: “You can take the horse to the pond, but you cannot make it drink.”

More to come next week, dear Readers. Until then …