Thread by @championswimmer

I never thought too highly of teaching as an activity or profession before I started doing it myself. There are teachers whom I deeply loved and respected though, and it always was for being "guiding" figures rather than for being great teachers of their subjects.

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The formal education system in India isn't the most conducive to produce great teachers for a bunch of reasons

1. No real performance evaluation in govt education instt
2. Too low pay and little care taken of in private ones
3. Investment into their learning is nil
4. Infra

As a result, we all growing up, have more stories of THAT "incompetent" teacher in school, whose own grammar was bad, or THAT teacher in college who never came to class.

Also as students, teachers are our favourite punching bags. Which is, ok fine, as long as it isn't toxic.

But there have been teachers who have shaped my life, for sure. There was Raj Agnihotri ma'am, my science teacher, who gave the best of life lessons, made us do some wonderful experiments within the constraints of a debilitated govt school lab, and truly cared for us.

So much so that, when she left our school, we took our bicycles, cycled 10-12 kilometers deep into the far end of Dwarka to her flat, (we found her address by asking other teachers at school), twice, because she wasn't their first time, to surprise here with cards and flowers.

There were others like like Meena Chamoli maam, who used to teach us social sciences, but we bonded in a whole different way on a trip to Amritsar for a inter school event, and while coming back, in the bus, she made us do impressions and joke about all the teachers.

She laughed on her own impressions, and jokes about herself the most. It is rarely that a teacher gives you that space - to make fun of themselves, and laughs along with you on that.
There ofcourse are many other teachers, I can continue naming, but I'll digress.

When I was studying for my JEE, at FIITJEE Janakpuri, the finest trio of Deepak Sharma, S K Tripathi and KK Sharma were my teachers. And while they were so damn good at teaching what they taught, I used to often think they expect us to master all three subjects while they have ..

... each mastered just one.

Years later looking at it much zoomed out and from the perspective of a teacher, I realise, they had to know each subject so much better to be able to solve EVERY possible question we had, but to clear JEE we just needed to solve 30 MCQs of each.

College (and this is the same story in any of the Tier 1 govt colleges) had mainly two kinds of teachers - the really bad ones - who knew shit about their subjects and were treating it like a "job" and were here because they couldn't do anything else in life, and ....

... the second kind - who truly deeply madly loved their subjects, were always busy working on some research projects, would only care to be cordial with students in their own projects, and had long stopped giving a fuck about regular class lectures and students in general

While all of this is the story of the "mainstream" education system (FIITJEE included, while it isn't school or college, for JEE, one or other coaching institute is something everyone joins and is part of mainstream now), my brush with teaching was with a non-mainstream way.

In my college we used to have "Special Interest Groups", which, the more active ones, would have weekly sessions where seniors would try to teach some real industry-needed skills, that our 20 year old curriculums didn't incorporate - 3D Modelling, Photo/Video editing, Coding...

... Robotics & Electronics, Graphic Design, Web Design, SEO/Content Marketing etc.
I incidentally found none on app/web development or any vibrant open source community in my college, and so I asked seniors in my college, many of whom were very supportive in helping set up one.

It was called DTUOSSSIG (DTU our college, Open Source Software, Special Interest Group). It was a massive success. First one run by 1st year students, and not by 3rd or 4th year seniors.
In fact I had cold feet when in some sessions seniors turned up to attend.

When graduating from college, I had some fine job offers, including Zomato (which I eventually did join 3 years later 😅), Facebook Singapore (which I didn't want to leave India for) and a few more. But a couple of internships had made me want to not take a 9-5 job.

The privilege of hailing from a family which didn't need me to start financially supporting it straight after college also helped. I could take life decisions without getting distracted with the immediate monthly salary figure as the biggest factor.

When @PrateekNarang27 (who was already teaching Data Structures and Algorithms at @CodingBlocksIn for a few months) talked about starting Android and Web development classes at @CodingBlocksIn, I didn't think twice. I was getting the chance to turn what I love into a profession.

When in college I always fought (and it wasn't easy) to keep DTU OSS SIG open. It was under the umbrella of IEEE DTU, but I never allowed it to be exclusive to IEEE members or even DTU students. Doors were always open for everyone, like open source should be.

At @CodingBlocksIn classes were paid. Just like any paid private educational institute. And it wasn't easy for me to mentally reconcile these two things. But what I had very clear in mind was - DTU OSS SIG was for folks to explore and find if they want to get into software dev

What @CodingBlocksIn was, was different.
You have explored, and you have made up your mind to learn how to make Android apps for example, but reading docs on your own or watching a few Youtube videos isn't working out. You want a mentor, and peers around you to learn.

Even then, deep down in my heart, in the bigger picture of things (like how "should the world work" meta level) I think if @CodingBlocksIn can be free, but the mentors are compensated via Govt. educational grants, that'd be the utopia. But ok, let's not go socialism vs reality🤣

Coming to why I have gone on into this huge history lesson - today I see the entire educational setup getting a major rejig, reshuffle and transformation.

Two factors in play. The powers that be at VC funds have found a new target domain to dump money into, and ...

... the COVID pandemic has forced education to got online and shut down traditional mainstream schools and colleges - which will continue like this for a year at least - long enough to form long lasting habits. (The second factor, accelerating the first one even more).

While more money coming into a field must be great, you may think? But my experience with seeing VC funds flooding a market have taught me that it will be a nightmare for the supply side. When ecom was flushed with funds, it eventually affected manufacturers and traders quite bad

Because the power of the platform allows Amazon to centralise things into "Amazon Basics" and "Appario Retail Pvt. Ltd.", which long term, not just kills the small traders and small manufacturers, it is bad for business because of Economics 101 - low competition & monopoly.

VC money in the food business has squeezed restaurants, made many of them bankrupt, given a short term employment boost to delivery gig workers (but also tied them into a unsafe, unreliable vicious cycle of personal economics), and increased our generation's wastage of money.

With cabs too, we now have millions of cabs on the roads which are tiny tiny underperforming assets in hands of high risk lenders. All cab drivers are deep in debt, and locked into their professions as the car loans are albatrosses around their necks.

And that brings me to education. There are two vectors that personally worry me

1. The huge marketing push by BYJU's, Unacademy, WhiteHatJr (and dozens more to follow).

2. The JIO effect, Youtube virality, and the growing "personality cult" teachers who go viral being "free"

Let's talk about (1) first. VC money always wants exponential growth. Good content -> word of mouth -> organic growth = this cycle will not satisfy VC greed. So we will see more FOMO, FUD, slapstick commercials, less growth based on the content being taught itself.

While I think this model of growth is bullshit for pretty much *anything*, it still doesn't trample my conscience as long as it is done with food delivery and cabs and ecom. But with education, where the 'quality' of it will make or break the next generation of our country...well

The problem with these quantity over quality approach is - it will not *really* help create great teachers. The idea would be to create some "iconic" teachers, like BYJU's founder himself, and then market the hell out of that person. This makes it impossible to newer teachers ...

.. to grow (they will be actively supressed), and keeps making the marquee teachers into god-personalities, rather than just teachers

For live classes it is not even possible for that one teacher to actually teach millions of students (classrooms aren't like Modi rallies right?)

And for recorded content too, I feel it is a sad sad world, if we want a "winner takes all" model for education. Wonder how one-dimensional a world it will be if everyone has been taught by the same teacher? Got the same analogies, same stories. We will truly create robots.

As a founder of an educational institute, while I have ambitions to keep it growing, I would never want "every possible person in the world" to have learnt only from resources I have created.
We all are enriched by our varied experiences of learning from different teachers.

The other thing is - it is 2020 and The Marketing Engine™ is a monster! Amazon can make ads that make you buy things you never wanted. Zomato can make ads that make you order food on a full stomach.
How bad can it be to throw this well-oiled marketing machine at education ? ☹

I will come back to the other fork of the story, that is (2) - the rise of free and viral personality cult teachers on Youtube.

I have been creating content for more than 5 years now. And I have been running @CodingBlocksIn for just as long. The free vs paid debate ...

... has always raged on. And I usually sidestep it mostly, I do have very strong views about it.

There are two types of free - the @freeCodeCamp and @khanacademy type where they "advertise" the *quality* of content, and others who advertise *being free*.

A strong undercurrent of feeling I see in these "cults" getting created, is there are lots of 'amplifiers' of the cult, who would keep saying (for example in comments under videos), that "thank you so much for doing all of this FOR US".

Sadly, very few people understand personality cults. Leaders of personality cults do a lot of things - give advice, help the downtrodden, talk about "revolution", but they do none of it for "us". They do it for themselves. They are not taking money, but getting paid in fame.

They are 'sharing valuable content' for free, you might say... what is wrong in getting popular? They surely are getting popular by doing something great!

But the problem is when someone 'optimizes' for fame, they start creating what the masses wants to see...

... and not necessarily what they originally wanted to create

And it has happened to me, all so often. Sitting down to create a video, I have often decided to create a low-on-content (teaching any new skill) but high-on-bullshit (advice or outrage or opinion), because - "VIEWS"

And thus, I come back to what I said about @freeCodeCamp and @khanacademy

Do you want top notch content by great educators (and it will be really nice if it turns out to be free) ?

Or do you want free content, and hope for the best that it is of good quality ?

You get me ?

Now this thread has run quite long, and I am beginning to think it should have been a medium article instead, so let me try to conclude with my closing thoughts and solutions I think we need to look at (and those that look like solutions, but are not).

For 'professional' education, one of the biggest hurdles is getting really good people to come and teach. I have heard the ages old bogus argument that those who really want to teach will not look at wages. Oh well, fuck off.

I will teach for $100 vs $200 for a cushy job, if I really really love to teach. $100 for teaching and $500 for the cushy job? I might try to take time out after work.
$100 vs $1000 for the job. Yeah, fuck teaching. I have a life too.

The best professionals today are paid...

... 10x what they would be if they were teachers, today. Especially those 10-15 years into their careers.

So fix that before you complain about not having quality teachers.

That money has to come from somewhere right ? Either people pay upfront to learn (which I feel is really the best. transparent, honest, get what you pay for), or we turn to socialist utopia and get taxes to fund it. But we need it.

The other thing we need to understand is - we do not need one big huge corporation that runs education of the country/world like Google/Amazon/Microsoft.

We don't want 1 teacher teaching millions of students via internet. That creates one-dimensional robots.

Just like I will use some of my examples and analogies from my life to teach how to make apps and websites, someone equally well equipped to teach about apps and websites will use their own life stories.

A teacher doesn't just read out the book/documentation to you.

Their stories, their learnings from their own pasts, (and yes their own prejudices too) shape your learning. Different people learning the same skill from different teachers is what makes for great teams. If everyone in your team have learnt their skill exactly the same...

... where will any out of the box thinking ever come from ?

And finally, we really need to cut down on personality cults. Not just education, but in life.

Arnab Goswami like events in education can be catastrophic. In the name of 'free educators' I am afraid, we are seeing...

... the rise of something akin to televangelists and digital 'baba's

How long before they use their immense popularity not to push educational content, but conspiracy theories, political beliefs, hatred, prejudice - because all of that gets more 'views' than actual education.

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