For the love of the art

I made this comic for my class blog. And since my students don't seem to care about it at all, I thought it will be interesting to use it here and talk about why I love teaching. I guess the short version of it is that it allows me to bring up all the (somewhat) repressed tendencies to be dramatic, crazy, and most of all to talk a lot. 

I have been teaching for a long while now. Formally, as Assistant Professor->Associate Professor->Professor etc. for 15 years now. But well before that I was informally teaching little kids whenever the opportunity presented itself (and it did present itself with some frequency). These past decade and half obviously have presented numerous challenging, frustrating, and rewarding experiences! 

I love Chemical Engineering, and especially love Reaction Engineering. In fact a few years ago, when we were working on Underground Coal Gasification, one of the things that most enamoured me to the topic was that we coined the term 'nature's own chemical reactor' and shopped that phrase in many conferences (of course to raised eyebrows and snide giggles). 

But mostly, I love teaching. I study diligently for my classes. I have fresh notes for every class I teach - both online and in a notebook (not necessarily overlapping). Based on a session I attended during my MIT days, I don't hesitate to use the chalkboard, though the convenience of PPTs cannot be always denied. I use my blog space and moodle, and (unsuccessfully) tried to use another platform called TodaysMeet to foster discussions (which did not happen). 

With pixton, the chance presented itself to augment something I had taught them in class with a comic, I jumped at it. And in case you are wondering, the "Doublets"(or word ladder) game was invented by Lewis Carroll and you can find tons of them online. And no, I did not first encounter them in wikipedia but rather in that GIGANTIC GREEN 'Complete works of Lewis Carroll' that we owned in the family (and which my sister and I read sooo much). *

[& no I owe no explanations about surface reaction mechanisms & elementary reaction steps here]