IIT Madras honours school teachers who inspired students to excel in JEE last year

The Hindu

a day ago

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras has organised a two-day demo day on June 9 and 10, where candidates who have qualified in the Joint Engineering Examinations (JEE) will interact with students, alumni, and teachers and visit the facilities on the campus.
Candidates unable to travel may participate in the online event to be held on June 3. Offline events are being held at six cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Vijayawada, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
In Chennai, around 300 students and their parents will participate in the event. The students will also have an opportunity to attend classes that will be conducted by professors. They will visit laboratories and the Centre for Innovation. The aim of the effort is to help students decide their course of study.
Institute director V. Kamakoti said the top 100 ranked students invariably choose computer science and engineering over core engineering subjects. 'We conduct several efforts like Shaastra, Saarang, Open House, and CFI Day. We want students to opt for core engineering over CSE,' he said.
The institute has introduced awards to honour pre-undergraduate teachers whose efforts were instrumental in their students making it to the institute in 2024-25. The 'First Principles' Teachers' award (FPTA) recognises the teachers who helped the students understand concepts in physics, chemistry, and mathematics within the IIT-JEE syllabus.
Institute director V. Kamakoti said students had two methods of learning; one is rote and arriving at the right answer by elimination in JEE. The other is understanding the concept and applying them to arrive at solutions. 'This is the ideal way of learning. This is how school education should be. We wanted to recognise such teachers,' he said.
'We asked the students who was their inspiration and we asked the first year students to nominate their teachers. The second group of students consistently come up with unexpected solutions. This was the reason we decided to honour them,' he said.
Sabitha G.J., mathematics teacher from Ida Scudder ICSE School in Vellore, has a personalised way of teaching. Her student Adhil Ahmed, a student of the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science said his teacher had motivated and inspired him. 'He would sit alone and solve mathematic problems in the afternoon. I sat with him and encouraged him,' she said. She sometimes uses dance movements and rhymes to teach concepts.
Chemistry teacher Anurooop Naik of Bengaluru was nominated by his student Arun Radhakrishnan, a student of Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Mr. Naik said he would use daily incidents to explain concepts. He had a nickname for his students using chemical compounds that helped students remember the concepts. Mr. Naik is an alumnus of Banaras Hindu University and taught class 11 and 12 students in Srinagar for three years. He says they were the most enjoyable years so far. He plans to set up his own institute when he finds motivated physics and mathematics teachers.
Prathap Haridoss, Dean, academic courses, and Amrutash Misra of AskIITM Initiative, and alumnus also spoke.