You have nothing to loose except your fobia

You have nothing to loose except your fobia

I usually put in a lot of effort to ensure that my SF's open up and start participating in class room discussions.  However, the results have been very discouraging. I have never understood, WHY?

It could be due to variety of reasons, which I can only guess. I asked my one of my friends who is a  psychiatrist . One of the things he  said "fear of something" is  the reason in most cases. I see his point. A student may be afraid of making mistakes; may worry what  others in the class will think; may have a real reason to think that he/she might penalised and loose grades by talking wrongly or asking "stupid questions".

I must confide that also have a fobia  : I am afraid that I might become maniac and overdo things which I like.  So at times  I hold  myself and do not reach out to my SFs.

This website has been started with a view of making all my SFs participate in the process of content creation. Do not be afraid of anything. Join the activity and you wil  yourself see what I mean. If you do not like the activities, you can leave any time, nobody will ask you questions. Give whatever time you can give. One hour by 100 SFs in one semester means 100 hours for me. Stop being afraid of making mistakes, there are  lots of uses of that too. You may not  be able to correcly assess the value your contributions/comment/question etc., leave that to me.

Back in 1979-1980 when I had just joined and I was teaching complex variables, one of my students, who wiould have been  normally considered at the bottom of the class by all accepted standards, asked, " Sir what are the singular points of the function 2^z? Is it anlyatic every where?" I had to stop for a moment and think before answering him. I still rememeber V. Prasad asking that question and that particular moment of my class, his expression, are frozen permanently in my memory. This question  has appeared in my test and exam papers and now appears in my book on Complex Variable (page 309). There are several such instances.

Finally, for whatever reason, you may want to withhold your identity, please do it by all means. You may have an account on 0space under an assumed name.

I am already "afraid" of over emphasizing a simple point, I will stop here for now and hope the message is clear.