Third Side of the Coin

By Jayanta Banerjee

The third side of a coin is essentially the one that connects the other two sides: the head and the tail. This analogy is used throughout the book to emphasize the importance of mastery learning in any profession, such as medicine, law, or engineering. Mastery learning is the essential outcome of uniting the two flat faces of a coin with the help of the third circular side. In any profession, the two flat faces of the coin are theory and practice, and the third side is the testing.

The author gives examples from his more than fifty years of experience in engineering practice and engineering teaching to prove that mastery learning is essential. In the very rapidly changing pace of technology today, any curriculum that ignores mastery learning is bound to produce obsolete engineers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palibrio
• Release date: Apr 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781506503332

Jayanta Banerjee

Dr. Jayanta Kumar Banerjee is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. He has studied, worked, and travelled extensively in Asia, Europe, and in North, Central, and South America. He publishes in the areas of engineering, social sciences, and education and also writes poems and short stories in English, Spanish, and Bengali.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Jayanta Banerjee.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015906042

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5065-0306-6

             Softcover     978-1-5065-0305-9

             eBook          978-1-5065-0333-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Rev. date: 27/04/2015

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ÍNDICE

1 Mastery Learning

2 Some Autobiographical Reflections:

   India (1941 – 1961)

3 Training Abroad in Germany

4 New York City and Canada

5 The Waterloo Years: 1965 - 1969

6 Latin America

7 Back to North America

8 Summing Up

9 Final Remarks

10 Current and Future Trends

In Memoriam:

In loving memory of my mother, Monica Banerjee, who never went to a formal school but taught us Mastery Learning through practice.

Dedication:

This small book is dedicated to my loving wife, Matty Muñiz, who never went to an engineering school but learned (and taught me!) applied house-spouse engineering, again through practice.

"The best way of being is by doing." Chairman Mao Tse Dong

PREFACE

In coin tossing, heads and tails are the only valid outcomes. A coin that lands on its edge, or third side, is discounted as an unusual toss. If repeated several times, we call it a biased coin.

But consider how results can change by altering the coin’s thickness. A cylinder shares the same basic geometry as a disk, yet the probability of its landing on edge is far greater. In other words, quantitative change leads to qualitative change.

The analogy can apply to engineering education. Design and implementation are the large, flat sides of the circular coin. Testing is the circumference that connects the two. Similarly, in a practicum, formal internships unite theory and practice. Medical schools require internships and residencies for graduation and for entering the profession, yet such valuable learning-by-doing experiences remain optional in engineering – not only for earning a degree but also for teaching. While most universities insist on a Ph.D. or its equivalent to teach engineering, they do not require a Professional Engineer’s (P.E.) license, which requires four years of work under a professional engineer. Shouldn’t a P.E. be required of engineering educators? How can we teach something we do not practice?

To fulfill our goals as educators, we want our students to achieve mastery. Yet mastery is incomplete without an apprenticeship and a good master-learner partnership, a combination of theory and practice. This involves an educational journey or pilgrimage – an investigation into the nature of individual experience, artifacts, actors, and operations. The exploration can lead to unpredictable directions. For a time, my own academic pilgrimage took me outside the traditional confines of engineering. I worked at what organizational theory defines as a boundary spanning unit between North and South America, helping Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO), a global volunteer group, bridge the culture gap with engineering schools in Colombia and their surrounding industries.

No course could have taught me how to navigate the cultural eddies that can cause real-world projects – such as the technology transfer issues I worked on in Latin America – to founder. I collected data less in the form of an engineer’s numerical chart than as an ethnographer’s field notes. Previous experience as a graduate student in cultural anthropology helped me take notes.

The common thread in my overseas assignments, however, has been mastery learning through hands-on experiences. As the noted social studies educator Gertrude Whipple commented, No one can give the learner a concept. He must build it out of his own experience. Once the concept is formed out of empirical experience, it can be used to analyze data and develop new insights.

In a broader sense, academia and industry also belong to two different cultures. Businesses demand quick, practical solutions to specific problems. Universities build knowledge over decades, and aspire for the irreversible expansion of the human mind.

The aim of engineering education should be to bridge this culture gap by alternating classroom experiences with industrial internships, both for the engineering students and their instructors.

Sharing my personal experience with Colombian educators and business leaders helped break the ice. However, curriculum studies and educational research rarely count such autobiographical reflections – the inner drama of the researcher’s intimate experience with himself during the research activities – as valid learning experience. But it is akin to the songwriter becoming the composer and the conductor. Existentialist writers like the late Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes would call it the wahowahowaho of inspiration. Perhaps the better metaphor is the three-sided coin that keeps beating the odds because internships thicken the curriculum. Head or tail, experience remains the best teacher.

Mentoring

The word Mentor derives from the name of the advisor to King Telemachus in Greek mythology, yet mentors figure prominently in all world literature. As a child, I heard many such stories from my grandmother as she recounted the Indian epics. The god Krishna became the powerful mentor of Arjuna during the famous war in the Bhagavad-Gita, while in Ramayana, the Hanuman was the faithful mentee of the banished prince Rama. It was from my grandmother that I gained my first lesson on such matters: to be a mentor, you must be both teacher and friend.

Today, college students often need the helping hand of a real, human guide. This is particularly true during the first and final years of undergraduate studies, when the student is either adjusting to the transition from high school or trying to determine a career path. In most engineering schools, a student counselor or a faculty advisor assists with course selections and may also conduct exit interviews before graduation. While this help is important, students wrestling with difficult decisions often need a more intimate guide, someone who can provide inspiration on both a personal and professional level.

A mentor’s job combines several roles. As described by sociologist Morris Zelditch of the American Council of Graduate Schools, mentors are advisors, people with career experience willing to share their knowledge; supporters, people who give emotional and moral encouragement; tutors, people who give specific feedback on one’s performance; masters, in the sense of employers to whom one is apprenticed; sponsors, sources of information about and aid in obtaining opportunities; models, of identity, of the kind of person one should be to be an academic.

To learn more about effective mentoring, I conducted a study of practices at several engineering schools of similar size both in Puerto Rico and mainland USA. I used standard qualitative research methods, such as interviews, questionnaire surveys, and fax and e-mail messages from deans and chairpersons. Here are some of the findings.

Mentoring takes time. A professor-mentor needs to supervise a student throughout an undergraduate program, not just for one or two semesters.The most effective mentors, those who leave a permanent stamp on their students, are typically senior faculty members with years of professional and academic experience. Many of them are no longer actively involved in research, and so have more time for mentoring. They are also not worried about publishing in refereed journals, getting research grants or winning promotion or tenure. Such senior faculty members should receive a financial incentive or compensatory release time for their work in advising students.

Peer mentoring among undergraduates, if designed, implemented and executed properly, can help improve a student’s overall academic and extracurricular performance – not just grades. Students meet more often with their peers than with their instructors. In addition, students tend to be more open-minded and honest with their peers and thus able to build a relationship of trust.

With the growing international population at our colleges, special attention should be given to the particular needs of these students. Ideally, foreign students should be mentored by someone with international experience to help alleviate the varying effects of culture shock.

As I investigated these various aspects of mentoring, my grandmother’s stories echoed in my memory, reminding me of a key principle. After all, a mentor’s guiding maxim should be the familiar saying, A friend in need is a friend indeed.

CHAPTER 1

Mastery Learning

"A supreme misfortune is

when theory outstrips performance"

Leonardo da Vinci

Mastery learning is a lifetime of learning, and it can be achieved through apprenticeship and a good master-learner partnership, a combination of theory and practice. This is the theme of Third Side of the Coin. Because of my apprenticeship in Engineering, I have given examples from my own areas of engineering education. However, the doctrine of Mastery Learning through practicum holds good in other professions, such as, Law, Medicine, Cooking, or Sorcery.

More of a the-best-way-to-be -is-to-do type of education is proposed in the following pages. It is hoped that the third revolution of informatics, after the agricultural and the industrial revolutions of the past, would tend to offer a more universal education to us in order to live in harmony with nature – its flora and fauna, its mountains, rivers and deserts – in sum, the macro-cosmos. This is possible by an experiential learning, by doing a task while learning it, at the same time: the apprenticeship. If the two sides of a coin are theory and practice, the third side that connects the other two is the hands-on experiential learning.

This method was used by our ancient ancestors throughout the world, from the Asians to the Amerindians, from the Dravidians of Harappa in India to the Mayans and the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru, millennia before our current revolution of the informatics.

This approach, a good flow of information and action between a master and the practitioners, can be established again on a one-to-some basis. This is the message.

The Third Side

The third side of a coin is the most neglected side. The statisticians ignore this side while tossing a coin. If a coin ever stands on its third side, rather than falling on head or tail, it would be an ‘unusual’ toss. If this happening repeats several times, we would call it a biased coin! As the thickness of the coin increases it changes from a ‘disk’ to a short ‘solid cylinder’. Thus, changing the dimension of the coin’s third side – its thickness –changes its name from a disk to a cylinder, even though the basic geometry remains the same, unaltered. A quantitative