How to explain the most complex issues of electronics so that students understand? What to do if a student knows the material, but feels completely at a loss during the exam? How does the availability of the Internet harm today's students? Igor Kaftannikov shares his memories and thoughts. He is an alumnus of the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute (CPI), Candidate of Sciences (Engineering), Associate Professor of the Department of Electronic Computing Machines of the SUSU School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, author of more than 70 printed works and 10 textbooks, awarded the medal "For Labour Distinction", and currently teaching the course in "Digitalization Technologies and the Internet of Things".
– Why did you choose the teaching profession?
– I think I’ve always been pretty good at explaining things. Even as a child, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the situation in the world was quite tense, I read newspapers, listened to the radio – and then explained the current political situation to my peers.
I was born in 1947. I went to a regular school. I chose my specialty myself. Probably my parents' example influenced me as well. My father graduated from the Rostov Technical Institute. He was in the labour army during the Great Patriotic War, worked at the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, developed alloys, then worked at the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant (ChMZ). During the war, my mother studied at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, and in 1946 she also began working at ChMZ. I know that during the war she put out lighters on the roofs of Moscow buildings and helped nurse the wounded in the hospital.
Under Khrushchev’s rule, experiments in the field of education, or rather, in the training of specialists were conducted. I had just finished the eighth form when they decided to increase the school term to 11 years. After thinking about it, I decided to enrol in a technical school: I had to study for three and a half years but could also get a specialty. I chose a metallurgical technical school located in the ChMZ District. They had just opened a new specialty there - "Control and Measuring Instruments and Devices in Metallurgy". At that time, interest in this area began to develop in the USSR. And I was interested in technology, I even assembled a crystal radio receiver myself. I graduated from the technical school with honours. After the third year, I was sent to work in the adjustment section of the Assembly Department of Uralmontazhavtomatika, I had to finish my studies in the evenings. Therefore, in total, my studies at the technical school took four and a half years. While I worked in the department, I travelled all over the region, went to different enterprises. And I also became the winner of the physics Olympiads among the technical schools of the National Economy Council (Sovnarkhoz) in the second and third academic years, that is, two years in a row. By the way, later, as a student at the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute, I also participated in the Olympiads and took first places.
After graduation, we, graduates, were supposed to be drafted into the army. We were divided into groups. The first two were drafted immediately, and ours was deferred until autumn. In the meantime, I decided to enrol in CPI. Although I was a good student, my father hired a physics tutor for me. But I knew the subject, so the tutor was not interested in me and he sent me to various Olympiads so that I could see what problems they offered, and then find the solution myself. I understood physics quite well, but the technical school did not provide enough knowledge on optics. And, as luck would have it, I had to answer a question on optics at the entrance exam. Moreover, the question concerned a concave lens, and the textbook only considered convex ones. But I remembered the picture from the textbook, thought about how to find the focal length, correctly constructed the diagram and was able to get the right solution. The examiners were surprised: how I coped with the problem if it was not in the textbook? But I got an A, which meant I could immediately consider myself enrolled: I only had to pass physics. So, in 1967, I entered CPI. There was an exam on the 1st of August, and on the 3rd of August a summons from the military registration and enlistment office arrived. I came with a certificate from the dean's office. The military commissar grumbled: he had a conscription plan. He asked why I needed this – after all, I already had a profession. But I wanted to study, and I did not give in to persuasion.
– What was interesting in your student life?
– I was two years older than my classmates, I already knew and could do a lot, and so I became a leader. On the collective farm, I united the team during the harvest. As a teacher, I also went with the students "to harvest potatoes". From my third year, I began working in the Komsomol bureau of the Instrument-making Faculty of the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute. In my fourth year, I was already the secretary of the Faculty Bureau of the Komsomol. I received an increased Lenin scholarship. I hosted KVN (Club of the Funny and Inventive) games. Then I became Deputy Secretary of the Komsomol Committee for Ideology at the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute. I was offered to go further along the Komsomol line, to become a secretary of the District Committee. But I refused, since I did not really like this work. I was rather interested in science.
– Whom of the teachers do you remember the most?
– Among my mentors, I would like to name our dean Lev Silchenko – I had the opportunity to interact with him a lot. I was also greatly influenced by Ivan Pinchuk, who headed the Department of Automation and Telemechanics – a famous scientist, an excellent lecturer, his lecture material was always clearly structured. He could explain everything in understandable language, although electronics is a very complex area. The teacher Aleksey Gudilin was young then, he was interested in electronics himself, and he tried to pass on his interest to us. I learned the basics of teaching from them. When I was a student, my classmates often asked for help if they had difficulties in their studies, and sometimes teachers asked me to explain to my classmates the material that I understood well.
I consider Alla Morozova, a participant of the Great Patriotic War, to be a born teacher. Once we took an exam with her. Our class monitor knew the material, but since he was afraid of her, he was stumped and could not even utter a word. But Alla Morozova found a way out: she asked me to explain in simple words what she was asking about and left the room. After some time, she returned - the monitor had calmed down and passed the exam. Another front-line soldier, Alexander Baev, also taught us classes. Among my favourite teachers, I want to mention Gennady Torbenkov, who taught the course in "Theoretical Foundations of Electrical Engineering". By the way, as a student, I won the intra-university Olympiad in Theoretical Foundations of Electrical Engineering two years in a row.
– How did you start working at CPI?
– In 1972, when I graduated from the institute, I was offered the position of an assistant at the Department of Industrial Economics and Production Organization. I was invited there by Aleksandr Tashchev, who was then the Vice-Rector for Education. At the same time, from 1972 to 1974, I was Deputy Secretary of the Komsomol Committee of CPI for ideology. My scientific and pedagogical experience was retained. The university was then headed by Vitaly Melnikov. I had the chance to meet him quite often when I worked in the Admissions Committee – I was engaged in the maintenance of the automated system “Applicant”. It was one of the first such systems in the USSR. In 1974, I was transferred to the position of an engineer at the Department of Mathematical Computing Devices and Equipment, which later became the Department of Electronic Computers. It was then headed by Rudolf Chaptsov. He later transferred me to the position of an assistant, then senior lecturer. I worked on the scientific topics of the department, under contracts concluded with enterprises. I would like to note that our developments at that time were no worse than the American ones.
I wrote my Candidate of Sciences thesis on parallel computing, which was a poorly understood topic at the time. My work was supervised by Associate Professor Gennady Nikitin. For consultations, I had to travel several times to the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrumentation (now the St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation) to see the head of the postgraduate program, USSR State Prize laureate Professor Mikhail Ignatiev (it was good that plane tickets were inexpensive at the time). I defended my thesis at the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrumentation in January of 1987. Housing was tight in the Northern capital, and it was impossible to find a hotel, so I once lived at the airport for two days. In 1988, I became an Associate Professor, and in 2001, I became the Head of the Computer Department of the Instrumentation Faculty, and I held this position until 2012. Before me, the department was headed by Andrey Melnikov, a very competent and proactive specialist, and it was largely thanks to him that the department survived the difficult years and grew in scientific and pedagogical terms. Incidentally, it was his idea to create a local computer network at the university. He also helped organize a cooperative that laid such networks for other institutions and organizations, in particular, for the city Department of Internal Affairs. The innovation did not make its way immediately; there were sceptics. But the police authorities and personally Valery Pustovoy, who headed the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs from 1984 to 1994, were very pleased and gave the network a high rating.
By the way, I saw my first personal computer in Leningrad, when I was there on an internship. I was studying in a correspondence postgraduate program. A personal computer was such a rarity then that it caused a real stir – there was a 24-hour queue of people wanting to work on it. For example, I was only offered a few minutes – and that was deep in the night. But after my internship, the rector of CPI asked me to give a report on microprocessors – at that time this was a novelty. It took me quite a lot of time to finish delivering the report to all the heads of departments of CPI as there were so many questions!
– Please tell us about interesting moments of your teaching career.
– Sometimes a sense of humour comes in handy when you need to smooth things over. For example, one of the students put forward a project related to the Internet of Things. The topic was fish detection. When I asked how he was going to look for fish in a pond, the student suggested installing surveillance cameras in the pond and providing electricity via cables and insisted on this method. I had to give examples from old Soviet comedy films, explaining to him the inefficiency of this method: after all, it is much easier to look for fish using an echo sounder.
– What is important to you when working with students?
– To understand students: what they want and what they can do. Of course, you have to strive for knowledge at the university. It is interesting that you can almost immediately spot such students. Unfortunately, there are those who simply do not want to study. The availability of the Internet has played a cruel joke here: young people often believe that they can find all the necessary information on the Internet. But this is far from always the case. Something may not be there, something may be distorted, unreliable or presented unsystematically. It is studying at the university that gives systematized solid knowledge, and you can get it by attending lectures, seminars, independently working with textbooks, specialized literature. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Computer Science Department recruited four groups – at least one hundred people. Not everyone, who wanted to, could get in.
– What do you like about your job?
– I like it when the students’ eyes light up with interest in the subject, in the topic, when students can answer a question not only because they have memorized it, but also because they understand it. But, in my observations, there used to be more of those who understood it.
It is important for me that the students themselves like to formulate logical answers, offer different options for solving problems, and set tasks.
I am pleased with the successes of the students who study with me. For example, in 2023, my Master's degree student Sergey Rasskazov took the first place at the SUSU Student Scientific and Technical Conference. Together with other Master's degree students, Anastasiia Kozlova and Aleksandr Khlyzov, we prepared an article and a presentation at a serious international conference, Global Smart Industry Conference (GloSIC-2020). And it is very upsetting when, for various reasons, very smart and worthy graduates go not into science, but into other fields. Yes, they also become leaders there – but science loses them.
– What do you see as the advantages of different generations of students?
– When I was studying, our generation was striving for knowledge, education, profession, and mastering new things. For example, my classmate, on his own initiative, calculated the number π to the thousandth decimal digit! Who would think of that now?! But even now there are guys who are searching and inquisitive. For example, two of my Master's degree students set a goal to ensure that information from smartphone to smartphone was transmitted using a light beam. That is, they did not study electronics, but photonics: information is carried not by electromagnetic radiation, but by a beam of photons. The signal was read by the smartphone camera, converted and decoded – for this, the students wrote a special program. The development formed the basis of their diploma theses. By the way, photonics is a very interesting and promising field; it has been actively studied abroad. It is important that when transmitting light signals in devices, wires are not needed, and this means savings in production and the absence of a negative impact of wires on each other. But this is a topic for a separate conversation.
– What advice would you give to young teachers?
– Do what you must do! Believe in yourself! Anyone can succeed in the field they are professionally engaged in. And for myself, when working with students, I have developed a rule and advise all my colleagues: first, you need to determine how prepared the students are, what their level of knowledge, thinking, mastery of the topic, material, conceptual apparatus is. That is, understand what is in their heads. And in general, it is important that each student can correctly, clearly, and distinctly formulate a thought. Those who think clearly, express themselves clearly. But to reveal this, interviews are needed, not testing. That is why, by the way, I do not like correspondence and distance learning. And having determined the level of the background knowledge of students, move on, pull them up to the required level, gradually expand and deepen their knowledge of the subject. Unfortunately, it happens that students stumble simply because their poor vocabulary does not allow them to correctly word a thought. That is why it is so important to help them master the conceptual apparatus, the necessary terms. And knowledge must be consolidated in practice. You need to try to stir up passive students so that they understand what is interesting about the subject. For example, presenting boring logical operations as a picture can help get them interested!