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Showing posts from October 31, 2004
An 'eye opener' Let's say that you are teaching a class. Let's say that you are teaching Unix. You have drawn a neat sketch of the inode-wise layout of the disk and you are explaining the concept of the hierarchical filesystem and directories and inodes and hard and soft links with the help of your neat diagram. Suddenly you discover that one of the students is not getting the whole picture ... because he can't see ... *because he is blind*. At that moment I didn't really feel the impact because I was too engrossed in the subject, too engrossed in teaching. But the whole thing really hit me hard on the bus ride home. A thousand questions were raised, not many answered. First, about teaching - in such a situation, do you teach for the lowest denominator or the higher one. Doing anything is going to unfair to the other category. But in this case, the whole problem is magnified to a huge extent. I obviously cannot rely so much on gr