GASICS Part 3

Now, in most coaching classes, your rank in tests decides the batch they put you in.

When I joined at the beginning of 11th grade, I was placed in the best batch, Wizards. My drop in performance in that first year had shifted me into the worst one, Champions.

This was a dark place, where most of the kids had already given up on themselves. They whiled away time on their phones, showing up to class just to keep their parents happy. Cash cows to pay for the salaries of the teachers of the higher batches.

It wasn't all bad though. I found a small set of people in similar situations to mine, hungry to do better. That, and GREAT teachers.

Good teachers change minds, great teachers change lives - me on twitter.

When our math teacher came in on the day of the first offline class, I nearly laughed out loud. Here was this short, stocky man, with beady eyes, and a pair of old lady spectacles. I remember thinking, can this guy even teach? Probably cant even reach the top of the whiteboard! I was dead wrong (on both accounts).

The sheer intensity that he brought to each class drew me in like a moth to a flame. His style of teaching was to force a gun down your throat, and threaten to pull the trigger.

I had never had a teacher who dealt with students with the 'tough love' attitude before, and I loved it. No other teacher has pushed me as ruthlessly as he did since.

The funny thing about limits is that, in 99% of cases, when you go past them, you realize that they were self imposed, this whole time.

He meant well, its just that he knew which batch was teaching in. Being toxic was the only way to kick something worthy out of us.

Now physics, that's a different story. I fell in love from the first class.

We were doing Bernoulli's equation. I'm a visual learner, and I clearly remember the the image of three knobs popping into my head, for the three different kinds of energy involved, which the equation tells you have to add up to a fixed sum.

What I found very exciting, was that as I turned one knob up, I could SEE the rest of the knobs having to turn down, because of this fixed sum.

I was hooked, being able to predict the future was fun! . By the time we started discussing its applications, I was head over heels in love. Here was the reason that planes stay up!

What I love about physics, is that it runs on the assumption that everything you see (and things that you cannot see as well) can be explained.

Using a good explanation, you can predict what happens next. While math is plain, dry,and usually doesn't care about things in the real world, here was a subject that provided explanations of the things that ticked, beeped or moved, from a ball rolling around, to a frisbee dipping in the air.

I enjoyed every second of physics classes.

My mother has drilled into my head to ask as many questions as possible, until I'm fully sure that I've understood.

In school, the teachers shut down my questions, saying "this is out of syllabus". This is one of the reasons that my physics teacher was, is, and will continue to be a living god for me.

I would assault him with questions, and he almost always ended up staying for 2 hours extra after lecture time to answer them, finding different ways to explain the same thing until it made sense.

Our chemistry teacher was on the other end of the spectrum. A sweet calm man, polar opposite to the wild intensity of our math teacher. He had to take all his classes online, which led to most people falling asleep, but I made sure to pay attention. It paid off very well in the due course of time, contributing to a sizeable chunk of my total score in Advanced.