Teaching for making a change or should it be Teaching with a change!
Everyone’s teaching changes over time. It may get better or worse.
For me that question does not arise. My better part is never better; it is always waiting to get better; it keeps going assuming teaching comes with innovation and humility. It is always born in future. It is a constant process to be enjoyed.
When should a teacher be “done” and satisfied!
For some reason I never feel satisfied or done. I have not produced several good teachers from my class. Not yet, but I am more hopeful than before. Always in the past most of the students liked my teaching. That is not good. That is not good enough. I want them to criticise and find faults.
Unless we produce students who are teachers themselves, we have achieved nothing. They do not need to be a teacher in their professions, but they should be teaching anyway. Without building that attitude our courses are meaningless for me. I do not want to be the best teacher. I want to produce best students according to their own bandwidth, within their own capacities; my job is to increase that capacity and have them continue learning.
Teaching the weakness present among experts is fun and is the best way to teach
To stretch their goals I bring lots of research articles. I show them how the top journals in the world like JAMA (Journal of Medical Association, for example) publish articles that even our NYC BSRS students could find sub-optimal. It is the critical thought process that should develop.
For example, I am teaching them for past few months the limitations of brain blood vessel imaging. These developments are supposed to be life saving, very complex, but they are not. Reason is not too many people have worked on these developments. Fresh ideas are absent. I share my editorial comments from European Radiology with them and simplify the arguments; the neurosurgery is so important that a lot of science should be going in there. I show them that it is currently not.
Editorial on Brain AVMs-Sarkar-European Radiology 2023
Editorial on Black Blood MRI-Sarkar -European Radiology 2024
