I had to write on this one 
Sometime a single person can have impact on you, for your entire life. Prof Jayaram was among the one in my life.
He taught us 3 courses, Data structure and Algorithms (4th sem), Object oriented Programming(5th sem) and Computer Networks (6th sem).
I still remember his first class where he came, and went to the board and written down ddj.com, stl, sourceforge.net and some other sites and words to look in the Internet. He told us to start contributing boost library and competing in topcoder. For most of us (not including me as I had done computer science in my 12th) programming was still unknown except for some C course in 2nd sem. And this guy comes in and says directly to programme using templates and use linux (or build your own flavour from scratch).
So it was completely chaos in the class, class was religiously divided into two sects. One headed by gucchi, pc and shridhar who were in favor of him and other headed by lodha, patel and other guys who can’t even stand him. I was enjoying this drama in the class, as I didn’t had any problems with him in the class also I was following what was happening in the class.
Our class used to be like open discussion on any stuff you like in programming. He would even answer silliest of questions and that discussions would last entire lecture and even after the class hours. Sometime they would discuss about compiler optimization, sometime he would try to write a code but sadly he wasn’t able to write a significant code apart from a generic linked list.
Finally people had adapted with his teaching, they understood what eventually matters is how much you score in the tests. So our final lectures before test were crucial ones as in that only the syllabus was finalized. For him he has covered everything under the roof, and we had to negotiate the course which should be asked in the test. So one night before the test people used t o search on wiki or google to make up the notes. Obviously people were not reading the books, anyway not a single book can cover this much of syllabus.
To give an idea about the course we studied in our first course Data structures and Algorithms. First we started with STL, some C++ and then moved to CLR book for Algorithms. In that we learnt about big O, theta notations and some theroms. Some sorting and searching techniques, trees and graph theroy. For graph theory we had to follow boost library but I don’t think anyone except some few bothered to see it. Then finally we studied Finite Automata, some state machines. I think he tried to teach us entire computer science in one course, but fell far short from it.
Some positives and negatives about his teaching:
What was good about him was that he showed us the big picture, he shown us the world outside the campus and how to be benefited from it. His approach was top – down one. Show students the big picture, and then finally come down to basic blocks of it.
But sadly that approach didn’t work, the problem was on both parts. From our end we never tried to understand his teaching and also his part too where he was always in his world of Bjarne Stroustrup or Lippman. So there was never sync between us. Some students who tried hard in his courses are best placed now. But I don’t think its because of him, he was just showed us a path all we had to do was to follow the path.
Other problem was that he was also not sure of what to be done in class. He was more like a scientist who at his whim would decide to speak anything which comes into his mind. We were always anticipating anything new would happen in his class but everytime he surprised us.
Whatever people had to say about him, but I always enjoyed his presence in class. His typical smile and way of saying I would always remember. I wish I could have been more studious student in his class, anyways I am following what he told on the first day now
