Boosting Your Thinking Potential - A Tribute to a Great Man

In university, there is a man called Booster who teaches students about microbes.

Booster’s success in teaching, if you can call it such, lies in games of question-and-answer. Other lecturers would come in, open their notebooks and proceed to overwhelm us with transparencies and dictations that we all have to struggle to put down on paper before it goes sailing over our heads. Often we pay too much attention to scribbling line after line of illegible notes and not enough attention to what all the words mean so that when we exit the lecture hall or classroom, we do so with blank looks on our faces and clean-slate memories. We blame all this on lecturers who have no clear focus on what they are trying to impart upon us pathetic, hapless students, and so try to impress us with table after table after statistic sheets and other senseless data.

Booster makes none of these mistakes. Booster comes to class armed with two whiteboard marker pens. That’s it.

Well, rather, Booster comes to class armed with two whiteboard marker pens and his ammunition of insults.

You will find no other class like Booster’s. In no other class will you find a lecturer who strolls in, sits down at the desk in front of the class and proceeds to take the subject – and students – to pieces. That’s why we all hated him and his lectures at first, I guess. Imagine hauling your sorry ass into class at some Godforsaken hour, your eyes still heavy with sleep and your brain still wooly, and subsequently getting yelled at and insulted for the next hour.

(Booster, if you are reading this, I am sorry. I hope you do not think it insulting that I describe your teaching methods as such)

Let me give you an example of what a typical Booster-conducted class will be like: let’s say that the topic of interest for the day is How to Optimize Nutrient Uptake in Microbial Systems. Booster will go, “Okay, how can you increase nutrient uptake? (class remains quiet) … Come on! (in exasperated tone. Class continues being quiet)… Can nobody answer this? Come on! … Aiyah you!” and proceeds to volley a bunch of insults at you, which was pretty much how our first few classes went. In the event that someone manages to summon enough courage to attempt an answer like, “Maybe increase quantity of substrates?” they will be flattened in response with questions like, “But how much can you increase substrate quantity?”, “And how will substrate quantity affect the conditions of the broth?” If you do not answer, he will eventually tell you, in a very exasperated voice, that increasing substrate quantity will increase liquid viscosity. If, however, you volunteer that answer, you will be confronted with another question like, “And how does liquid viscosity affect the production of the desired metabolites?”

And so on.

It was all we could do to endure his lectures. And notes! Booster never gave us notes, verbal or printed or photostated. Nothing to fill our notebook pages with except for hours of unanswered questions. For the first few classes, our pages remained blank. Later, slowly, we wised up and started copying those questions. And much, much later, we timidly ventured to answer his multitude of vicious questions.

And guess what? We learned.

Booster’s approach in teaching has never been to bore students with useless facts they can find in a textbook. Instead, he brings up topics in class and challenges you to discourse and debate the issues, using the facts you have read up and your ability to think round them. Every time he shoots you down with a well-placed arrow of a question, he forces you to piece together all that you know, and think about the logic behind your answer and the strength – or weakness – behind your reasoning. He makes you come up with a dozen possible answers, weigh them all, rationalize with yourself, and discard all but the most sturdy ones – right there and then, without having to lose sleep over it. He gives you no support by way of notes – he expects you to find things out for yourself, based on the issues he has raised. He will give you no backbone – you must have your own.

Booster’s role in the classroom is the Spanish Inquisition, and your role is to outthink him. It does not matter if you make mistakes – if you can endure the berating part – as long as his questions have made you think for yourself. Have made you an independent rationalizing entity.

Eventually we warmed up to him, grew thick-skinned to the occasional lighthearted scolding he gave us, boldly answered his questions. In return he gave us all nicknames that stuck like exopolysaccharide, and told us jokes in class and took us to Port Dickson and cooked lunch for us. We ceased to think of him as a mad, sadistic griller and more as a guy who knew his facts and wanted to make absolutely sure we knew ours as well.

And now as I look back, I find his method of teaching the most effective because in forcing us to thoroughly understand everything we discussed, he made us remember everything. Everything. Up to this day, if you were to ask me to give a lecture on sewage treatment I could still give you a fairly lengthy discourse on it. And it’s all because I understand every single little part of it.

Of course there are others who may not agree with me, others who may think his way of teaching too harsh, his grading of exam papers too severe and uncompromising. (Booster once told us that if we gave him back in exams all he gave us in class, we deserved at best a C. To get an A, we would have to work our butts off and put in hours of extra work. He also boasted that nobody ever got an A in his class, and that if anyone ever did they deserved to be called Gods and Goddesses, and that he would personally call their fathers and tell them how proud his children have made Booster. Well, Booster, you owe a fair number of our dads that phone call!) But these are the people who have been spoon-fed all their lives, people who never questioned what was being dealt out to them, people who have never had to put in decent hours of work because their lecturers gave them all the notes they needed and gave them sympathy marks in exams. (Booster would never stoop low enough to give a student marks he didn’t feel they deserved)

Sometimes I feel sorry for them. After all, they never had a lecturer who taught them to think for themselves.

The Mutant
September 2002.