Jack of all circuits, master of none

For my Electrical Circuits 3 course, my class has the fortune of being taught by Professor David Nairn. The man knows his stuff. He can write and talk about circuits faster than anyone can copy them down. There has been few professors in ECE that 1) spoke good English and 2) cared enough for students to want to participate for random socialization, but Professor Nairn is definitely up there in my books.

I think one of the biggest things I appreciate is his patience. A few of us were complaining about how the TAs were holding the tutorial ("Here, check the circuit with this shortcut. What, you don't know it? Just take it by faith that it works...") and how there's a large gap in understanding. Basically, there is the normal (but time consuming way...small signal modeling for those of you that speak MOSFET), but there is also a handful of shortcuts that you can take to quickly return the voltage gain of the model (that collector/emitter resistance thing...shaves at least 20 minutes off analysis time, if you're slow like me). Whereas most profs would've just told us it's easy and do more questions, this is how Nairn replied:

I don't expect you to be able to pull stuff that off by the final exam. Once you've done this often enough, you'll start seeing things like that. There is nothing wrong with using the small signal model. In fact, there was a man I used to work with (at another university)...he must've retired by now...but when I took a look through his coursenotes, small signal (the long way) everywhere. Just keep at it. Circuits isn't suppose to be easy.

Then he threw in some remarks about eating, sleeping and exercising (of course, we all know students don't get enough of all three...but that's another story). I blinked for a bit, trying to comprehend what he had just said.

Right now, it's okay to be "inefficient" - Probably the most realistic thing any of our teachers have said to us to date. Not it's easy (yes, we know you think it's easy). And that even circuit masters (hey, retired circuit profs must be masters) take it nice and steady. Yes, I want to be ownage at designing and solving circuits...but there's finite understanding time between my level of understanding...and that of my circuits professor's. Until then, it's okay to be slow. It's okay to be inefficient.

Growth isn't achieved overnight. Understanding doesn't always come rapidly. This is a lesson often forgotten.