On Writing Assignments: Thoughts from a teacher to his students

Very soon your assignment marks will be out, and before having a look at your assignment marks, I would request that you spare a couple of minutes and have a look at what I’ve got to say as regards my students’ assignments with me. [You may also want to look up my other article on the same subject HERE]

Madras Christian College has never compromised on quality. Yes, I underline the word NEVER. Be it the legendary Professor Benet Albert or the revered Dr.Vishnu Bhat, or the great Dr. Robert Burns, or the vibrant Prof. Rajani, or the scholarly Dr. Nirmal Selvamony,  (literary giants who have always stood for high academic integrity that they possessed and practised) - teachers of the glorious past who have laid a  lovely paradigm for the future as regards the quality of assignments – it is our sincere wish and ardent desire that, this rich legacy is sustained through all the students (trend setters) who pass through this sylvan conclave of excellence. That was the commitment that motivated them, and that continues to motivate us even today.

Indeed, we are and always will be votaries of this excellence, and NO SECOND THOUGHTS ON THAT!!

A good assignment is basically a sustained inquiry into a particular subject of study. Your guide would want you to systematically augment your thesis statement with effective props to authenticate them. Your opinion of course matters a lot. But, what is more important is the support statement that gives the required credentials to your opinions. And, support statements offer a good deal of weightage when they are propped up by the views of critics/scholars/giants in the respective field of enquiry. In order to do this effectively, make sure your thesis statement is convincing (not confusing!). Cathy Keller Brown, an expert on the subject says, “Before you do anything else, make sure you have a clear understanding of what your instructor expects from you”.

Other expert Professors like Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman, who are with the University of Arkansas observe in their enlightening article “The 5 Biggest Mistakes College Students Make”:

“Problem No. 5: Going it alone. Many students shy away from going to see their professor or teaching assistant, either because they're too scared, they think the prof won't want to see them, or they think you should only go when you're in trouble. As a result, they end up blowing a test or paper when a few minutes with the instructor could have easily cleared up the problem.”

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Always remember that,you are expected to discuss with your guide (professor) as regards your chosen topic, and your guide will in turn give you an issue of a standard Journal [like our own Eclectic Representations], to help you get suggestions in your adventure/tryst/journey with your research article. The guide normally spends at least 30 minutes with you, giving you suggestions/ideas on writing better, and helping you tackle your thesis statement as befits a students of MCC.

Your guide is usually available over email or personally in the Staff Room, during College Working Hours.

You can fix an appointment with your guide a day in advance (by phone/email/in person) and make sure you meet him/her at the specified time. Your guide, apart from giving you guidance on getting good research material in the city’s libraries, may also give you his/her own reference books to finetune your article better.

Check if you have included an abstract in about 150 words.

Check if key words have also been included along with your abstract. (words, and not sentences!)

Check if you have given a minimum of at least TEN print sources.

Check if you have cited the page numbers for all the citations/quotations included in the article.

Check if you have followed the MLA Style Sheet format for quoting page numbers in your article.

Check if you have abided by the MLA format for Research Papers in your ‘Works Cited’ section.

Check if you have included a minimum of at least 18 paragraphs in your research article. (the minimum is 18)

Check if you have a word length of at least 3000 words. Your MS Word will help you identify the approaching word length better.

Check for any spelling mistakes/grammatical errors that might have inadvertently crept into your article.

See to it that you submit your assignments before the deadline. (e-assignments are just an option given to students for publishing them later).

If you have done all of the above, kindly question your guide if your grade is below 90!

Otherwise, stop the lament and get back to the basics!

There’s no compromise on quality AT ANY COST!

And to bring out the best in you!

With all best wishes, 

- Rufus

Course Teacher

Assignments - Reg

Dear Students,

Thank you for the overwhelming response in submitting your e-assignments. This is also to inform you that the provision for submission of assignments ended at 12 am last night. You may look up your assignment marks on 01 November 2012 at 10 am. in the Department Notice Board.

You will be graded based on your written performance (in accordance with the parameters laid down by the Head of the Department).

Discrepancies, if any, should be brought to my notice on or before 2 pm on Monday, 05 November 2012.

With warm regards,

Rufus

Special Classes for I MA English

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MCC Physicists and the Making of Modern India

Dr.N.Lakshminarayan, Associate Professor of Physics, MCC, gave an enlightening lecture on ‘The Physicists from MCC & Making of Modern India’ today (26 October 2012) at 9:30 am, to a packed audience at the Anderson Hall, with a host of distinguished luminaries, achievers, historians and scientists [all MCC-ians] among the audience, enlivening the session.

Excerpts from his Lecture:

Dr.K.S.Krishnan [BA 1916-18]

It is indeed a great honour to talk about the Physicists from MCC and their contributions to the making of India. The impact of Physicists from MCC on the Indian State is of course part of Indian History – Mr.T.N.Seshan, Mr. M.M.Rajendran, Mr.S.Narayanan are some of the names that immediately come to mind. If I start talking about them that would require another few sessions and also be quite out of my league.

Physics has driven civilisations and transformed societies. Physics and Physicists have been at the root of everything. Today’s strategic thinking is based on nuclear power. Japan, after its recent natural disasters has charted a road map towards ‘zero’ nuclear energy by the year 2040. However, the Japanese Cabinet abstained from fully endorsing the zero-nuclear option, and a small number of new nuclear reactors remain under construction. The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

MCC Physicists and India

All ye MCC-ians interested in knowing about our contribution to India and the world - it's time for you to keep time on the 26th of October at 9 am sharp in the majestic Anderson Hall, for an inspiring and enlightening lecture by the renowned physicist Dr.N.Lakshminarayan on "MCC Physicists and the Making of Modern India".

Be there...!

The Aura of Assam - III

the rickshaw puller with his customers

Thus far, one is bound to fathom for oneself, how life is lived the hard way out here, what with rains playing hide and seek every now and then, adding to the desperation of the village-folk. Unpredictable as the weather is, the menfolk take it upon themselves to have multi-tasking skills – they have lots of side businesses to keep their cash registers ringing. In some cases, it was a sad sight to see even teachers (from the noblest of professions) were forced to act ‘business-like’ to earn their bread and butter by the day, which was, so to say, the order of the day, here in this clime and weather.

When it comes to religious fervour, one can vouchsafe with all integrity that the Assamese would score much much higher on their RQ than their counterparts in most other parts of India. Every place of worship has people flocking by the dozens and chartered trips (often called line trips) are a craze here, when it comes to having darshans of their favourite deities. Sunday evenings were marked by bhajans and other related rituals which testify to their zeal and religious intensity.

The Aura of Assam - II

captured from our car - a common sight in this part of Assam

The second leg of our sojourn was through the meandering exotic locales that crisscrossed the sylvan landscape of Dibrugarh. Unjustly called the NH-37 (National Highway), as it doesn’t even match up to the claims of a village road at many places, our journey ended in rude jolts and bumpy rides all through the 78 km long journey which again took us an unusual 3 hrs and 20 minutes of travel time.! This ‘NH’ traverses the entire length and width of the state, and at many places, to our horror, we saw rail lines laid parallel to NH roads with just around two metres separating road and rail lines, and no walls in sight, to protect the unwary layman from the approaching trains.

The NH bustles with bus transport provided by Assam State Transport Corporation, and one interesting line that caught our eyes all along our travel was the tag, ‘Under ASTC’ – words that found a place in almost all buses, omni buses, vans etc. When our inquisitive group members quizzed a bus driver on this tag, he had a remarkable explanation to offer. It seems ASTC had embarked on an ambitious plan of handing out govt buses on lease to private operators. This, he added, was due to the frequent bandhs and strikes that crippled

The Aura of Assam - Part I

at a tourist locale in Sibsagar

(This piece of writing is a kinda travelogue of this blogger, edited at quite a few places, to cater to my blog-audience). Our sincere thanks are due to Dr.Thongam (Manipur), Dr.Nath (Assam), and Prof.Ramjoshi Chandra (Gujarat) for their insightful and incisive thoughts on the subject.

Well, the flight-trip from Chennai to Delhi was indeed comfortable but not as breath-taking as the one from Delhi to Assam (something akin to, but that which can never out-rival our Shimla sojourn of September!)

Be it the eastern section of the great Himalayas or the great southward bend of the beautiful Brahmaputra, or the pointed peaks or the snow smothered mountain passes, or the tantalizing tea estates that criss cross the length and breath of the hill state, or the alluring charm of the endless lakes that lay a claim to the heart, spread over the entire state, it was indeed a trip of a lifetime..!

Excerpts from Professor Spivak's Plenary

Professor Gayatri Spivak giving the plenary

Questioning Identity
[Speech transcripted by this blogger]

Let me say two things which are really about me but not really good for academics. I was the first and only woman of colour to have been offered the University Professorship in its 258 years of history. I would like to emphasise here on the depravitude of a world-class university that it could find only one of us in so many years, and I am also the first Indian to be offered the Kyoto Prize. I want to make a case to the prize-giving organizations in the United States that, among the many who have received from the US, only Gayatri Spivak in India could be able to receive this prize. Now, that is incorrect. 

I begin with the understanding that the ethical is the unconditional call of all 'others’ and the democratic is a politics based on training in judgment. Education and democratic habits of mind, relate most importantly to primary education of the children of the largest sector of the electorate, which in the case of our country is the millions of children of the landless electorate.

The call of ‘the others’ asks the ethical subject to resist identity. Identity is not going to go away. We can be very sure about it. We can’t resist it because it is very strong. I love my identity because I am very firmly placed in Bengali. 

In 2000, When the University of Toronto was about to shut down its Comparative Literature program, I went to talk to the President and it got a lot of publicity on the internet also. I told him that it was “health care for a culture”. You can never think of doing moral metrics by indulging in knowledge management tecniques! The true aim of the Humanities is to train the soul! And yes! you've got to do it slow! Not fast!

What then constitutes a healthy culture?  The condition and... [couldnt follow Ms. Spivak here - sorry about it]… It’s a culture, not a philanthropy. It means, to suspend the interest of the self in the interest of the other. This morning, my old friend tells me, “they have to be told”. 

This is the exercise given to the imagination, where literary reading is taught in a robust way. And this cuts across schools of criticism and so, you need not be a structuralist to do it this way. As some of you might know, the great divide in literary criticism came to the United States in the critic Rene Wellek at the start of the II World War. This was the big divide in literary criticism in the United States. In college, we were given a good foregrounding in texts and in criticism. We were taught the historical approach, and when we did that, we were able to construct the original vision of the author. Later on, our imaginations were being trained to suspend our imaginations in the interest of the other. 

A healthy culture then is produced by the training of the imagination by the humanities. We should thus be taught to get into a text by suspending our interests. Here, we are talking about the institution. I have actively looked for a distracted theory of the double bind. In literary criticism, when you set out to look for something, you find it. Following this rule, I now feel that a double bind is rather more than the suggestion that having found it, you can play with it. The humanities should somehow learn to serve the double binds. 

Servants and women have been taught to fit into these coercive gender structures. This morning I chided a girl for bringing me a chair to sit on. That, I feel is coercive gender behavior. Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there. 

Looking homeward, I reminisce on my first professional presentation at an institution of tertiary education in India. The double bind here is between caste and class, necessarily also understood as race and class. There are certain contradictions here between the preserved performatives of indegeity and civilisationism which cannot even enter into the security of a double bind. 

Comparative literature perceived from a field of desires, that thinks of globalization, that thinks of the experiences shared by the first language learners among the overwhelming majority of infants, …

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor at Columbia University, lighting the lamp at the International Conference on Ethnicity, Identity and Literature at Sibsagar College, Joysagar, Assam (at 5:30 pm, 11 October 2012) in the MCB Auditorium.

Lecture on Structuralism - Reg

Dear Students, 

Kindly make it convenient to attend a guest lecture on "Structuralism - the Basics" by an illustrious scholar Prof.Daniel David, between 8:30 am and 10 am on 05 October 2012 at the A/C Seminar Room (MPhil Room).

With warm regards, 

The TEA Team