The best teachers of BUET

According to me in 1996-2001 the best teacher in CSE, BUET was Prof. Dr. Kaykobad. Well this write up is a revenge write up, because this man has praised me relentlessly in so many places and often have given me a godlike status which I do not deserve. Sometimes it was pleasing and sometimes it was quite embarrassing. If I survive till age 80 (Very unlikely) I will write how it all became embarrassing, not now :).

In my book an outstanding teacher needs to have two qualities (a) Have a good sense of humour (b) Have the capability to inspire his students and Dr. Kaykobad has these two qualities in plenty. In a place like BUET inspiring the students work best because almost any student can learn anything by himself if he/she tries seriously.

To illustrate his sense of humour some of his remarks are enough. Once some students of a University asked Dr. Kaykobad so set an easier question paper in the Final exam. His witty reply was “I do not want do prove how bad you are by setting a harder one.” Once a student requested him to give less homework (Sir used to give a lot of homework in some of his MS classes) and he replied “Some animals need a lot of burden to remain happy (He meant donkey), these homeworks are not meant for everyone.” The killer comment came towards me in 2007 when we were in Tokyo together. We were travelling via metro rail and I mistakenly sat in seats reserved for older and pregnant woman (Which was a pretty bad thing to do). He looked at my extra belly fat and said something like “It suits you well, maybe you deserve to sit there.” I blushed, I was stunned and what not. Once a renowned newspaper modified his articles without understanding the context and he said “They just used a random number generator and eliminated corresponding lines.”

Dr. Kaykobad inspires his students a lot and this is a very big “a lot”. In my student life there was no mobile phone, so he often used to call in our land phone and everytime he called I got butterflies in my stomach (Don’t get me wrong), because he was already such a famous Professor. Sometimes my confidence was low but after getting his calls I felt better. He called me to inspire to submit problems in UVa Online Judge (An online judge which was very popular in 1998-2004, programming contestants/students submitted solutions there to judge correctness) and I started to feel special (!), I thought maybe I have something in me that Sir is calling me regularly. The butterflies in my stomach died a bit when one day one of my batch mates told me that Dr. Kaykobad calls him as well and he has never submitted a single problem in UVa Online Judge. At that time i realised that Dr. Kaykobad probably just called everyone in my batch and may be everyone in CSE department to ask them to submit solutions at UVa Online Judge. In the lowest time of my life as a student of BUET he has written article on me in national news paper. These helped me a lot but I have miserably failed to inspire my students. So despite having a very good sense of humour I cannot be a teacher like him.

We had our differences on many issues but that has not hurt our relationship in the long run. A teacher should not be vindictive or have ego issues at least with his/her students, that is what I learnt from him.

The best young teachers I have seen who also happened to be BUET graduates are Mohammad Mahmudur Rahman of Mukto Software Ltd and Md. Mahbubul Hasan (Who was also a CSE, BUET faculty member) for their teaching style and because they have touched and also touching so many lives.