A facepalm moment from my lectureship days: A cos(theta) → 'ga' evolution! by dexterdev

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story · @dexterdev · May 27 '18 (edited)

$12.87

A facepalm moment from my lectureship days: A cos(theta) → 'ga' evolution!

India has tonnes of engineering colleges. The small southernmost state of India, Kerala has around [150](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_engineering_colleges_in_Kerala) engineering institutes! There are few good colleges, but most of them are very low-quality institutes. 

After my Masters in Engineering, I started a teaching career in an Engineering college. I was enthusiastic about delivering my knowledge in electronics, but I was a bad teacher. I was unable to grab the attention of my restless students. Actually, my classes were like the fun time for them.

One day, an unexpected visitor came to my office cabin. She was a lecturer from CS(computer science) department. (Ours is Electronics and Communication department) This lady had to teach communication engineering to computer science students. She was very tensed.
<center>https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2018/04/10/18/15/stressed-woman-3308283_640.png</center><sub>Author: [LillyCantabile](https://pixabay.com/en/users/LillyCantabile-8561101/), Source: [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/), License: [CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)</sub>

She said she needs to clarify a doubt regarding the content in her notebook. I said okay and so she opened her notebook. And asked me what do we call this mathematical symbol?:![](https://i.imgur.com/TxUCFHR.png)

To be honest I haven't seen anything like this in math content before. There is an alphabet in malayalam like this. It is pronounced as 'ga'. I was sure it is not 'ga'. So I started reading the notebook. I found the complete equation was like this: ![](https://i.imgur.com/3wuiCOW.png)

exoft=A ga! WTF is this thing?

And suddenly a blub lighted up in my brain. This is not exoft=A ga! This is exoft=A cos(t)!
![](https://i.imgur.com/xjuc10l.png)!

This equation appears several times in communication engineering. What it represents a sinusoid. If you want to represent a signal from an input point, we represent it using this sinusoid. The logic for using a sinusoid in place of any signal is the analysis of any composite signal will not be different, because any practical signal is a summation of sinusoids. What I stated is the Fourier theory naively. 
Let us get back to the story: what made our lady lecturer confusing? In my understanding this is what happened: Massive note copying is a culture ingrained in engineering colleges like this. Many students and teachers rely on other's notebooks. Rather than looking at the original textbooks, they prefer handwritten notes. And now this is like a generation of notes passed on! An evolution like below:
![](https://i.imgur.com/pCPktLW.png)

I think this incident is an eye-opener to the quality of teaching and learning in engineering institutes in India.





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@flyyingkiwi · May 28 '18

I think the most skilled lecture notetakers do evolve to start using a kind of shorthand. It does make their notes pretty incomprehensible to anyone else, plus sometimes themselves:)

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@dexterdev · May 28 '18

Yes. This is true. But a lecturer must take an effort to understand what is written in his or her notebook. To be honest the lecturer I am talking about was drawing those equations, not writing them.

properties (22)

@flyyingkiwi · May 28 '18

I see. Not understanding the material would make for a pretty stressful lecture.

👍 dexterdev

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@mobbs · May 27 '18 (edited)

$0.03

Might wanna fix that davinci tag =P

Also, cool! I'm often fascinated as to the original of Chinese characters, which is somewhat related to this. 

example:

![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcQkkkP2qRqkMxWxKgGyxZAZTqyu9S31sGsSgJtC3jB4K/image.png)

👍 dexterdev

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@dexterdev · May 27 '18 (edited)

Thank you @mobbs 😃. Corrected typo.

> Also, cool! I'm often fascinated as to the original of Chinese characters, which is somewhat related to this.

These kinds of error propagation is very common in biology and linguistics it seems. May be our stupidity also propagates like this.

properties (22)

@sathyasankar · May 27 '18

$0.03

When I was a student of engineering, I hated my college a lot and wouldn't go there regularly. My percentage of attendance always remained less than 75% and even had 14 backlogs then. Engineering education lacks quality. Those who study hard end up getting some high CGPA scores but not the knowledge. I can assure anybody can learn anything in this computer-era. Formal education fails to get updated.

👍 dexterdev

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@dexterdev · May 27 '18

The quality of education in India has to improve a lot. On the positive side, we have great institutes too. But then only few will get into those. So motivated students must take online courses like edx, Coursera, MIT ocw, nptel from internet. And Khan's academy too!

properties (22)