Painting the canvas, just not with colors!

Some lectures in an engineering class are more fascinating than others. I would agree that a larger chunk of that fascination is dependent on the time of the day, pre-lunch or post-lunch, outside weather, view out of the window, or even the fact that you are attending the class or not. Similar reasons apply for the instructors as well, except for the option of skipping the class altogether. To some extent, it also depends on what is being taught, and by whom.

Often, the only portion of class notes that remain legible until a day before the finals is the place where goes the course name, date, and sometimes the topic name. Downwards, letters start rolling into characters of a primitive language, not even clear enough to be understood by its creator. However, what makes all the difference in a lecture is embedded abstraction. Yes, engineering is systematic, it also has a lot of math, a claim that those with mathematics majors would outrightly reject, but engineering also has so much abstraction built into it. A part of it comes from trying to put a three dimensional concept on to the plane of a blackboard. One of my earliest engineering classes that I cherished was Engineering Drawing. It did not have much to do with engineering, just three hours of biweekly labs with the back bent over the drafting table. Surprisingly, between planes, sections, isometrics, and straight lines, lines were the toughest to understand. Another reason why a lot remains to student’s imagination is because the real world engineering has real and bigger issues. In class however, all that gigantic reality is stripped down to a basic building block, best expressed in terms of ‘dx’. The reverent ‘dx’ is the most versatile concept in engineering. It could be substituted for anything, from a fraction of a galaxy’s mass to a fraction of a nanosecond, the latter more conveniently called ‘dt’.

A very recent lecture started with a sketch of a simple coordinate system, three mutually perpendicular straight lines with arrowheads. In the 75 minutes that followed, it transformed into a complicated, yet impressive representation of some of the most important concepts in that course. A popular phrase with engineering professors is ‘Let us talk about it a bit’, and that is truthful enough of them, because what is taught, or rather can be taught in a class or in a semester, is just the ‘dx’ of something. To find ‘X’ is the problem left for after graduation.