These are not complaints for the sake of it. They are observations accumulated over years of sitting in classrooms, watching bright minds get dimmed by avoidable failures in communication, empathy, and structure. Most of what follows applies acutely to physics teaching at the University of Delhi, but the patterns are universal.
Each point is paired with what I believe is a better way — because critique without construction is just noise.
The “This is obvious” trap
Most professors are unaware of the gap in their knowledge and what the syllabus demands of them to convey to the students. They don't know what the student doesn't know at that stage or how the system would have caused them to grapple some important stuff. Common examples are usually in QM where operators, states and wavefunctions are not as intuitive as they should have been by the end of their Bachelors.
The phrase “this is obvious” almost always appears immediately after the least obvious step in the argument. It signals that the professor no longer remembers what it felt like not to see the step. Students learn a dangerous lesson here: that asking about “obvious” things marks you as unfit, so they stop asking precisely where they most need to.
Solution: Prep
It was in a scientific communication masterclass with Neil deGrasse Tyson where I first learned the importance of knowing your audience in scientific communication. Know what your students have seen before. Know what still feels alien. Then teach accordingly.
Passion vs. Moonwalking professors
As a professor it’s expected of you to have devoted a lot of time to your subject, getting the fundamentals very strong — not just in your prime but throughout your life. This I feel is true for the professors we see in Europe or other places, largely because these people have devoted their life to their craft.
Meanwhile Indian professors, in my experience of DU, have a life outside of their academics which is on equal if not bigger footing than their subject. These are family men/women moonwalking as professors. Is that wrong? No. Everyone must get to have a life. But it’s also true then, that you are not the most deserving candidate to be teaching young minds. There are people who haven’t given time to developing families or much outside their craft. It’s not sad for them. It’s their passion. And such men and women are infinitely more capable and deserving of teaching the young minds. These are the kinds of professors that inspire, that invigorate, that ignite curiousness by providing that firm base.
How professors answer student queries
Mastered the art of mirroring your question back to you wrapped like an answer. The class feels you have been answered. You feel awkward dragging it on.
Takes your question into something too obvious or in territory they’re comfortable with. After five minutes of circling: “So basically it’s complex. You will have to read and study. Let’s move on.”
Questions your credibility to have asked the question. “If you had been reading the book, you wouldn’t have asked such a question.” Or worse: “You’re asking this because you’re not studying.”
A simple “I don’t know” or “I haven’t thought about that.” But it is literally your job to know, to think of stuff that no one thinks. We aren’t paying to have someone read the book to us.
“Before I answer that, tell me ———.” Sometimes genuine Socratic method. Mostly cheeky deflection because they don’t know the answer and want to make you feel incapable instead.
“I’ll answer this later, we have to finish the course.” The syllabus is a god that must be fed, even if understanding is sacrificed.
As clueless as the students. After your question is put forward, nobody knows what happens next. It becomes a clusterfuck that only ends when someone breaks in or the professor decides we’ve lingered too long.
Ego, the tech gap & lost humility
The professors are too full of themselves sometimes, and lack the humbleness to understand that a lot of times, the students under you have grown far ahead — especially with technology. You CANNOT, it’s not even a question, be on par with them. So whatever ideas you are giddy or proud of, or insights you feel are gold, might have been scrolled by the student when he was 10. All those crazy quotes were read to him by his favourite YouTuber while enjoying a chai.
So teach what you know, and keep it as an exploration with these adults as your compatriots. You are not a god professing the gospel. It might seem emotional, but it’s mostly just disappointment in the loss of touch with reality these profs have. A lot of delusions.
The biggest delusion: attendance criteria
The biggest delusion is the criteria of attendance in their head. I get it — many students just don’t give time to the subject to gather interest to attend. But note that these are MASTER’S STUDENTS. They are here to study the subject.
Mostly it’s just your lack of skills in making the class engaging, or your obscenely visible lack of effortless command on your subject that ticks the student off — that his time is literally spent better someplace else. Get a grip. Pivot.
Four deadly teaching styles
Brings out her notes, starts reading it out. Students copy into notes. Standard bullshit. Some paraphrasing, a diagram copied to the board (already distorted from the original source).
Just follows the book, line by line, topic by topic. Not particularly bad — it’s predictable. But the professor becomes just a translator. Most of the class is capable of comprehending the book. It’s in between the lines that questions arise — which the professor can’t answer because he too is just telling you what is in the book.
Oh, the insufferable. Forget teaching — this person is here to say the things that get the loudest cheer. Not the good kind. This person isn’t here to teach; he or she is here to get the students to crackle on his jokes.
If the stories are good I don’t mind it. Because they might as well be just wasting our time as the copier. A good story lightens the day and we will study in the library later. But mostly they spend the majority of time in stories and fluff.
Concrete ideas worth stealing
Have students stand up and tell you what content is popular and what they are consuming. Understand their culture and what excites them. If a prof brings out Big Bang Theory in between his tutorial (one actually did), I instantly break my slumber. Explain stuff relating to movies, TV shows, philosophy and trivia. There is a fine line — don’t become the panderer. Your goal is still scientific communication. But your intonation and passion bring out more engagement.
Example assignment: “Take one Marvel character and fit as many principles of physics as you can to explain his or her powers.” (DU literally never has essays for physics. No options for creativity.)
You could have taught me to derive the first-order corrections to energy, or you could have explained the powers of perturbation theory in explaining small corrections to any damn thing.
AI can explain any concept, any nuance, far better than most professors currently do. At this point, you are just the inspirer and the trust foundation. Keep the basics tight. Keep the magic of physics alive — that AI cannot replicate. Manage the classroom, the learning environment, and the discussions. “To profess” will die if it hasn’t already.
Often you will be teaching subjects you are not adept in, due to college politics or admin. Either honestly take the time to prepare, or be honest with the students. It won’t help the perception of incompetence, but it’s about integrity. Let admin know the subject will suffer if you’re given domains that aren’t yours.
Never put them down. Maintain authority without finding a student to be the victim of your class pander or the one you use to keep the class light. If you do so, you are a vile human being and a pathetic person. Rotten. And trust me — there are a lot of rotten eggs.
You have mastered a tiny speck. You are here to share your passion and understanding of it. You are not the expert on all aspects and shouldn’t be lecturing on domains not your own. If anything, put it out as ideas or thoughts.
Mistaking difficulty for depth
Many professors mistake difficulty for depth. If students don’t understand, it is taken as proof that the material is “advanced,” rather than badly communicated. Obscurity is often rewarded: convoluted notation, skipped steps, undefined assumptions. Rigor actually requires slowing down, making assumptions explicit, and being precise about domains of validity.
Syllabus as performance, not contract
The syllabus isn’t thought out. Rarely have I ever seen syllabi getting completed, and when they are, it’s mostly hurried. Why make a syllabus if its only result is surface-level understanding? Most professors have to rush. Then they rely on scrolling presentations quickly or dumping most of the study as homework.
The Myth of the Standard Student
Professors often teach to an imaginary average student who:
- has perfect linear background knowledge
- learns at the same pace
- asks questions at the “right time”
- has no gaps caused by earlier bad teaching
This student does not exist.
Result: Anyone slightly ahead is bored; anyone slightly behind is lost forever.
Better framing
Teaching should assume fragmented knowledge, not ignorance. Most students don’t know “nothing” — they know incoherent pieces. The job is to re-cohere, not to dump more content.
Passion tests (beyond grading)
I once proposed the idea of passion tests. These tests are not for grading. They are conducted after the main exams, purely for the joy of it. Many students have to write exam-safe answers; professors have to make exam/system-apt questions. The student doesn’t answer by heart but by time constraints.
But this should be voluntary — where many students who don’t have extra-curriculars and whose whole identity is their syllabus get to enjoy and compete. These are advanced or more creative questions. They allow experimental questioning that gives rise to more critical thinking, both for the student and the professor. These are where the minds are forged.
The filtering mindset
A subtle but damaging mindset persists in academia: the idea that a professor’s role is to filter out who “deserves” to be there. This manifests as pride in high failure rates, dismissiveness toward struggling students, and nostalgia for how punishing education used to be.
This mentality is anti-educational and anti-scientific.
Science advances by lowering barriers to understanding, not by ritualized hazing disguised as rigor.
Physics as preserved artifact
Many courses are taught like preserved artifacts, unchanged for decades, with identical sequences, examples, and problem sets. Students are rarely told why a theory emerged, what problem it was solving, or what competing ideas failed. The history is very important. We don’t want survivorship bias.
You need to know why what you learn is the only part you learn, while scientists have tested what not. Physics is presented as doctrine rather than a response to concrete intellectual crises. Without historical and conceptual motivation, students memorize results without ever understanding their necessity.
Emotional illiteracy in teaching
Professors receive almost no training in recognizing cognitive overload, anxiety-driven silence, impostor syndrome, or learned helplessness. These states are instead misread as laziness or incompetence.
While teaching is not therapy, pretending that emotion plays no role in learning is delusional. Physics in particular demands prolonged engagement with confusion, and classrooms often punish precisely the behaviors required for genuine understanding.
Never teaching students how to learn
Rarely do professors explain how to study physics, how to read a textbook, how to debug confusion, or how to tell the difference between symbolic familiarity and actual understanding.
“But we made it” isn’t an excuse. You should make sure the next generation is better than you. What mistakes you learnt from. Your regrets. They need to know, even if they don’t follow through.
Students are expected to acquire these skills implicitly, which many never do. A single explicit discussion on how physicists think, how intuition develops, and how confusion evolves into clarity would save months of floundering and self-doubt.
Systemic incentives reward the wrong behaviour
I am not naive enough to ignore the huge part systemic incentives play in rewarding the wrong behaviour.
The problem is not merely that individual professors fail; it is that the system selects and rewards failure modes. Hiring prioritizes publications over pedagogy, promotions reward compliance rather than teaching quality, and meaningful feedback loops from students to curriculum design are absent. Bad teachers face almost no consequences, while good ones are overworked and burn out.
Until these incentives change, individual excellence will remain the exception rather than the norm.
Why physics education is uniquely vulnerable to elitism
In most human activities, excellence is comparative and contextual. You are not expected to run like Usain Bolt to be considered a good runner; you are not expected to play like Messi to enjoy football seriously; you are not expected to write like Dostoevsky to be taken seriously as a writer. These fields scale naturally. There are local optima, personal ceilings, niches, styles, and levels of mastery that are socially and structurally acknowledged. You can be “good” without standing anywhere near the absolute frontier of human performance.
Physics is different because its content is not scalable in the same way. When you study classical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, or relativity, you are not learning “a version” of these subjects adapted to your level. You are learning the same core structures — the same equations, the same conceptual frameworks — that Newton, Maxwell, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Einstein grappled with. The difference is not what you are learning, but how deeply and how independently you understand it.
This creates a psychological distortion. In physics, the beginner is immediately placed in contact with the intellectual residue of the greatest minds in history. There is no diluted Newtonian mechanics for undergraduates and a “real” Newtonian mechanics reserved for geniuses. There is just mechanics, and you either see why it works or you don’t — yet. That “yet” is where most education systems fail students.
However, the crucial nuance is this: you are not expected to rediscover physics, only to understand it. The tragedy is that teaching often pretends otherwise. Students are made to feel inadequate for not intuitively grasping ideas that took centuries, collective effort, and repeated conceptual revolutions to stabilize. No one tells them that the reason these ideas feel alien is not because they are stupid, but because human intuition evolved for throwing stones, not for Hilbert spaces.
There are other fields like this, but they’re fewer than people think. Mathematics shares this property. Philosophy does too. Music theory at higher levels does as well. But physics is particularly brutal because it combines abstraction with empirical constraint. You can’t soften it with style, interpretation, or personal expression. The equations either cohere with reality or they don’t.
This is why physics education is uniquely vulnerable to elitism. Because everyone is exposed to the same canon, competence gets conflated with proximity to genius. If you struggle, it feels like you are failing at being Newton, rather than simply learning Newton. In no other common discipline is the gap between student cognition and canonical mastery so naked and so constantly visible.
These observations come from someone who still believes deeply in the power of great teaching. The goal is not to shame — it is to raise the standard.