Drips of thoughts
I hope you will also feel alive and jolted
In 2002, I started teaching at the university, which issued a layoff letter over a Zoom call. The association with the employer ended in March 2022, a few months short of a twenty-year stint there.
The compact size of the college and the focus on liberal education appealed to me even when I went to interview about this time of the year in 2002. After joining the university later that fall, the first faculty colleague outside my home division that I contacted was the director of the Honors Program, because I was that much interested in working with those students and the program.
Perhaps it was in my second year, I proposed to offer a course in the Honors program, a course that would be interdisciplinary, with what I was confident was an attractive bait: Coffee. Coffee brings together geography, history, politics, economics, science, and the whole global-south/global-north issues. I mean, there is so much to read, think, talk, and write about, and I was looking forward to the course.
The course proposal was approved, and it was listed as a class for students in the Honors Program.
Reality knocked me down with a feather called enrollment. If I correctly recall, only two students registered for the class. We canceled the offering. I never taught that course.
I was reminded of a student in one of the classes when I taught in Bakersfield, California, complaining that I was expecting them to deliver like they were students at Berkeley. Could it be that the student in California and other students including those in the Honors Program had a point that I did not know how to work with the students that I had in front of me? But then, if our students graduated with BS degrees, with any of those cum laude tags too, and if students at MIT also graduated with BS degrees, how different are the degrees?
With every passing year, it became clear that I was a misfit in a traditional public university setting. Interdisciplinary was talked about at my campus and elsewhere as a wonderful idea but the reality was all about specialization from day one on campus. I do not think that I managed to get even a handful of students to be curious about ideas beyond their respective academic majors.
Why this woe is me, you ask?
Because I read this about an undergraduate course at MIT. “Undergraduate class blends science, hands-on experimentation, and a love for coffee to fuel curiosity.”
Of course, there is a great deal of science behind coffee. At MIT, they have resources for undergrads that will be beyond the wildest imaginations of students at universities like my former employer. Like this:
In the MIT Breakerspace, a new space on campus conceived and managed by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), students use equipment such as a digital optical microscope to examine ground coffee particles and a scanning electron microscope, which shoots beams of electrons at samples to reveal cross-sections of beans in stunning detail.
As we say in non-academic language, AYFKM? Undergrads get to use electron microscopes? What the what?
The course, “Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup”, which debuted in spring 2024, is awesome:
The class combines lectures on chemistry and the science of coffee with hands-on experimentation and group projects. …
The class pairs weekly lectures on topics such as coffee chemistry, the anatomy and composition of a coffee bean, the effects of roasting, and the brewing process with tasting sessions — students sample coffee brewed from different beans, roasts, and grinds.
Here’s the best part about the course:
A three-unit “discovery class” designed to help first-year students explore majors, 3.000 was widely popular, enrolling more than 50 students. Its success was driven by the beverage at its core and the class’s hands-on approach, which pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.
It “pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.”
I highlight that as the best part, and not the use of electron microscopes and other advanced gadgets, because I have often told students that by the time they reached the traditional senior year of college, they should have figured out how to ask questions that are appropriate and answerable, and they should have also picked up the content and the skills needed to answer those questions. Merely answering questions, even if they aced their exams, wouldn’t help them much in their professional and personal lives, I have told them. Imagine a freshman course that “pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.” If only …
One of my earliest posts on this topic in the old platform is from November 2012, where I wote:
I remind students that if they figure out how to how to ask pointed questions and then, equally important, learn how to go about in search of answers for them, well, those are skills that will be of immense value to them throughout their lives.
Of course, all these are not new ideas:
यः सततं परिपृच्छति शृणोति संधारयत्यनिशं ।
तस्य दिवाकरकिरणैर्नलिनीव विवर्धते बुद्धिः ॥- पञ्चतंत्र, अपरीक्षितकारक
He will become a wise man who will keep asking questions, listens to answers and contemplates on each of them.
His knowledge will bloom like a lotus when sun rays fall on it.- Panchatantra, Aparikshitakaraka
When Starbucks was new, I was all set to try a cup of coffee there. This was in Los Angeles, in what feels like eons ago. I got myself a cup of coffee, found a place to sit down, and took a sip. I could not believe that a bitter tasting hot water was being sold as coffee. Since then, I have been to that outlet a few times only because I have had no other choice when on the road.
Most people seem to associate a dark roast, which is what Starbucks offers, with strong coffee, when the reality is that caffeine strength has nothing to do with the roast. But, because most people add a whole lot of milk and sugar, making the drink a dessert, coffee brewed with a medium roast, for instance, does not make their dessert look brown enough. In the coffee culture of Tamil Nadu, people add chicory to the coffee, diluting the caffeine content but producing a dark colored coffee, which they mistakenly claim as strong coffee. And, they make fun of my black coffee as nothing but water!
Was it a year or so ago, when we had a couple of foreign visitors over for dinner and I served coffee after, one of them who drank it black said the coffee was smooth and tasty. Exactly! And I don’t even pay premium price for the brand that I purchase from the grocery store; in fact, it is the cheapest one among the options.
I am particular about the terroir. Coffee grown on some soil types can taste horribly metallic, for instance. The MIT course gives students the tools to figure out what causes these and other effects in coffee. How wonderful it will be to learn about those in a discovery mode, even for this prematurely retired ever-curious bald man!
Of course, I did not grow up drinking black coffee. The coffee that my mother made at home was the typical “filter coffee” with chicory, and with a lot of milk and sugar. It is like a latte that is made without complicated gadgets. But, the coffee that she made at home was far superior to the coffee that we had anywhere else because of how she made it.
Amma bought the beans in the raw and roasted them over wood/charcoal fire in the backyard. These roasted beans were then ground in a manually-cranked coffee grinder and, thus, it was always freshly ground coffee, so to say. Many nights my brother and I have helped amma with grinding the coffee as one of the final activities before she closed down the kitchen. This way, little time needed to be spent early in the morning.
Somewhere early in my American life, I switched to drinking freshly brewed black coffee. I found black to be beautiful. It is true; once you go black, you never go back. 😁
While electron microscopes and other gadgets that MIT students can use are not within reach, here’s a way that you can enjoy coffee as a meditative experience all by itself. You and your freshly brewed coffee. Nothing else matters at that moment. You become one with the cosmos. Try it some time.
