A cough and cold and general weakness had forced me to stay at home. I
was half asleep and half trying to make sense of the number 42 when the
fluid in my ears started swaying.
It took some time to realise that other things around me were also
swaying. This was the first time I had seen the walls of the house move
and tilt and to be very frank, it scared the hell out of me.
All that came later though. The first thing that I did on instinct was
to get out of the bed and head towards the door of the house. There was
this tremendous urge to just run and a lot of adrenaline was pumped out.
The Floyd song "Take it back" comes to mind.
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...
Comments