Ivan Iyer

Hello, I am Ivan. The premise of my teaching philosophy is that students of all levels, backgrounds and dispositions have the ability to think well and creatively. What students often lack is either an interest in whatever they are have been asked to study or a lack of motivation for the tasks that they have been assigned at school or college. This is either because what they study seems useless or irrelevant to their lives or simply because they have not been properly introduced to what they have been asked to study. My philosophy of teaching is to allow students to think for themselves by guiding them through difficult texts and concepts through conversations that are centered around what concerns them and what they are thinking about in their everyday life. I do not offer facts but help students to think about facts. Since I am trained in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences (fine arts, art history, film studies, modern history, social sciences, sociology, philosophy), I am open to working with students with different interests as well as individuals with varied interests. I am comfortable in a wide variety of disciplines and this makes me, I would like to think, a good fit for a wide variety of students irrespective of their educational backgrounds. I have some experience in conducting classes in Philosophy for undergraduate students at IIT Kanpur (my PhD alma mater) who have backgrounds in the sciences. I enjoyed conducting these classes for the excellent insights that students brought to these classes and was told that they too enjoyed these classes. Some students who lacked confidence in the initial days, went on to score top marks in the final exams and I am proud of that. That said, I am open to working not only with students enrolled in schools and colleges on a range of topics in the humanities and social sciences but also others who are not enrolled in any formal courses and either want to get enrolled in a course or simply want to discuss and learn. Our sessions will be for about an hour and will be centered around a text or a question that the student brings to class. What I will help them to do, is to firstly understand what they are reading, why it matters or can be of interest to them and lastly, how they can think originally about whatever they have been assigned to think and write about at school or college.