AB and Jha

I have often wondered whether we actually need profs to teach us the course. I mean, most of what they teach is stuff that one could understand anyway if one read the book. Moreover, one would probably save a lot of time that is otherwise spent in the class. As for the exams, most of us crack them because of our innate ability to either cram up stuff one day before the D-day or our ability to play with numbers and come up with an answer that is required to get marks. In any case, exams are hardly a true reflection of one’s learning or grasp of a subject. So the question then is whether a prof facilitates learning that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. To be very frank, in my humble, personal opinion most of the courses that I’ve done in IIML could have been done as well had someone else been teaching the course instead of the prof who taught us. And when a prof throws a question paper at you that is the exact replica of last year’s question paper, you sort of lose respect for the entire system that allows such things to happen. But then, every once in a while, you also come across professors like AB and Jha who through the sheer breadth and depth of their knowledge and passion for teaching command the respect that is ideally due to each and every prof. AB is an absolute stud. None of his students would ever dispute this. Everything about him commands respect – the way he teaches, the way he dissects a case and addresses the core issues involved, his focus on learning and disdain for petty things like attendance, even his exams command respect. Jha, I guess, is not so popular amongst the students simply because of the emphasis that he lays on rules and the amount of commitment that he expects for his course. But what I like about him is his passion for his subject and his commitment to the cause of making good managers out of us. He reminds me of the profs in IIT who have immense knowledge about their subject and believe that if they make it tougher for the students to go through the course, the students will finally, at the end of the course, emerge tougher and better. His lectures are absolutely unstructured and one might find it difficult go about his course in the normal manner of making notes and then cramming them before the exams. But then, his lectures are not about getting to know the 4Ps or something, they are about learning to think in a manner that hits the core issue of the problems that we might face as managers. I agree that his course in sometimes a pain because you are always expected to submit one assignment or the other or be prepared with a case presentation or something, but given a chance, if I have to choose my electives all over again, I would be ready to go through the pain again simply because I feel his classes are a value addition in terms of making us better thinkers of management problems.