The love of learning

When she was five years old and still living in India, Shirin Haque remembers looking up at the night sky and wondering if it was a solid dome. “I’ve always been fascinated by the sky,” she says. By the time she was twelve and living in Trinidad, she used to lie down in the driveway late at night and pick out the constellations. “My mother used to say, ‘You’re a mad person’,” she recalls, laughing. But her parents never discouraged her interests, and Shirin is now an astronomer who lectures in the Physics Department at the University of the West Indies. Last month, she was awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award, an annual prize for tertiary educators given by the Association of Atlantic Universities. Yet, growing up in a small Indian village in a family that was successful in agriculture, Shirin didn’t start school until she was seven years old and she came to Trinidad knowing not a word of English.

Now, she speaks four languages - English, Hindi, Urdu, and Spanish - and has also learned sign language. This last wasn’t because she knows any deaf people, but because she found it interesting. “I like the idea of being able to talk to someone at a distance,” she explains. A mother of two girls, aged 16 and seven, she also started working towards a PhD in Psychology when she got divorced about two years ago. Her marriage to a Trinidadian man lasted 14 years. She met her husband-to-be at UWI, which was the first time she really started interacting with people her own age who weren’t the children of Indian expatriates. “I fell in love and there’s no other explanation than that,” she says (though she admits to being strong-headed if she thinks she’s right).

Her three sisters followed more conventional paths. Her younger sister, who also has a Physics degree, works as an interior designer in Chicago, while her two older sisters, who had arranged marriages, are housewives in Pakistan. Shirin believes that the system of arranged marriages has, as she describes it, “a lot of merit.” But she would never return to India to live. “I’m more familiar with the culture here and the people,” she says. After she got her BSc in Physics, she took a year off to take care of her first daughter. Then she decided to go back and get her Masters in Astronomy: a move one of her former lecturers advised against, since he said she wouldn’t be able to get a job in Trinidad with that degree. But Shirin decided to go ahead anyway. “When you have passion, doors will open in strange places,” she declares.

And the first door opened at once: based on her first degree, she got a scholarship to pursue her Masters. Then, after she completed that degree in three years, the second door opened: IDB funding was available for her to do her PhD at the University of Virginia in the United States, which enabled her husband and daughter to accompany her for the two years there. And, behind door number three, one of her former lecturers in the Physics Department retired as she got her doctorate in 1997, so she was able to step right into his post. Her thesis, which involved mapping 7000 galaxies, helped confirm certain theoretical models of cosmology and was given UWI’s Outstanding Thesis Award for that year. Shirin enjoys her job. She finds too many students have what she calls “one-semester memories” but she blames this on the teachers. She says that students too often get boxed knowledge and don’t develop a passion for inquiry. “They’ve got to have a positive experience with science,” she declares. “You need to get that spark going.”

In a winning essay on her teaching philosophy, which she wrote for the bi-annual Guardian Life Premium Teaching award, she said, “My basic philosophy in teaching is that we should enjoy whatever it is that we are learning. I strongly believe that no human being can excel over and above average in anything unless they enjoy what they do. The rest of the job is up to me, as a teacher, to make mundane topics invigorating and exciting. The secret is simple, if one finds it fascinating and fun, strong chance someone else will too - because our feeling for the subject material becomes contagious.  Learning thus becomes a joyous effort.” She has never done a formal course in education, although she has read pedagogy for herself. An example of her teaching style is the technique she uses to show her students why a sidereal day (a day measured relative the stars) is shorter than a solar day (measured by the rotation of the Earth relative to the sun). She uses herself as the Earth and spins around the classroom.
“It leaves you a little dizzy, though,” she says.

She is also active in the Muslim community. Apart from giving lectures on the Qu’ran and cosmology, she is the person Islamic organisations call on for Ramadan. But most of the calls she gets from the public are on a quite different matter: astrology. Even in her classes, she has to explain to some students why the universe is 14 billion years old, not six thousand. As part of her effort to promote science in general, and astronomy in particular, she has formed the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy (CARINA, which is also the name of a southern constellation), a three-person organisation which hopes to make the Caribbean a centre for astronomical research. Shirin says new technology has made such an effort economically feasible: all that is needed is the right attitude and expertise. She concludes her essay on teaching with these words: “I want to create a society of perpetual learners that carry with them a passion for learning and life, thus creating a continuous lifetime of learning experience.”