Today’s episode of lazy-bloggers-solicit-guests-to-fill-in features Joel Corbo, a graduate student in physics at Berkeley. Joel and friends were disappointed by some features of the graduate-school experience, and (unusually) decided to actually do something about it — they founded the Compass Project, which supports excellence in science education, especially for women and minorities.
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My name is Joel Corbo, I’m a physics Ph.D. student, and I’m a little frustrated.
My trajectory through the US educational system has been a great one. I have parents who care deeply about me and my future and who believe in the value of a strong education. Because they cared, I went to an elementary school that laid a good foundation and allowed me to attend a high school that was more academically rigorous than many colleges (both of these schools were private, although the latter was also free). I also majored in physics at MIT.
My story may sound typical, at least in certain circles, but there are a few more details to add to the story. My dad is a recent immigrant without a high school education who worked as a maintenance man in the NYC Housing Projects, and my mom is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and a lucky survivor of the NYC public school system. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. Statistically speaking, I shouldn’t have succeeded — but I did.
Looking back at my education, it’s obvious to me that a huge factor contributing to my success was the presence of people in my life who believed in me and supported me: my parents, my teachers, and my peers. Even at MIT, which is primarily recognized for the quality of its research (and rightly so), I found a physics department that openly cared about undergraduate education, where teaching was valued and done well and which fostered a community of undergrads who learned from and supported each other.
So, why the frustration? My relatively rosy view of physics education was shaken up not long after starting grad school at UC Berkeley (By the way, I don’t want to single out Berkeley as particularly flawed, as I’m sure its problems are shared by virtually every physics department in the US to one extent or another. However, I can only write about what I know and this is where I am). Back in the cocoon of the MIT undergrad experience, I came to believe that physics was awesome for two main reasons: (1) because it answers deep, fundamental questions about how the world works and (2) because it is a community driven, collaborative exercise that thrives on the effective sharing of knowledge among its practitioners. In my mind, grad school would build upon these dual pillars of awesomeness and help me become (1) a great researcher and (2) a great teacher.
The jury is still out on the great researcher thing, but it turns out that, in principle, grad school has precisely zero to do with becoming a good teacher. Oh, you can TA a class here and there, as long as that doesn’t get in the way of what grad school is “really” all about. The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture; perhaps this attitude appears to benefit physics in the short-term by weeding out all but the most “serious” students, but in the long run it does nothing but damage.
The damage done to grad students is fairly obvious. First of all, if they are not provided with encouragement and avenues to become better teachers, then they won’t improve their teaching skills as well as they could have. If you happen to believe that an essential part of being a physicist is the ability to pass physics on to future generations of students, to inspire them to follow in the footsteps of their intellectual ancestors, then it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability to do just that. Of course, this happens all the time.
Secondly, there are always some grad students, including me, who have a deep interest in teaching (I remember deciding in high school that the only way to know if I really understood something was to try teaching it to someone else — so I can genuinely say that education has been on my mind for a long time). When people with such a passion are met with disinterest or even disdain by the people they want to emulate (successful physicists), the blow to their motivation can be severe. After all, who wants to stick around when their interests and talents aren’t valued or supported? I’ve heard it implied (and sometimes even said outright) that such students aren’t “serious enough” about physics and therefore aren’t worth keeping around, but without a crystal ball, who can really say which student will end up making important contributions to the field?
Let’s put the grad students aside for now (didn’t we just talk about that?), and spend some time looking at how undergrads are damaged by this attitude. Teaching is the single most fundamental service an academic department provides to undergraduates, and if, on average, a department is not interested in teaching well, the implication is that it’s not interested in serving undergrads in any way. But serving undergrads is vital to the survival of an academic discipline, because some of those undergrads are that discipline’s future experts. As I stated above, I was fortunate enough to attend schools that did serve their students well, but I can talk about the opposite through my observations as a TA.
Many students arrive at their undergraduate institution with a substantial number of long-held academic “bad habits”, especially in the sciences. High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug. Still, popular science books and NOVA specials have kept them interested enough that many intend to pursue the physical sciences as undergrads. Once they get to college, however, their passion for physics is quickly squelched by a number of factors:
- Because they don’t have the skills necessary to problem-solve, model-build, and generally think like physicists, these students actually don’t know how to effectively learn physics as it is typically presented in a large lecture-based class. This doesn’t mean that these students are stupid, or somehow not worth teaching. It simply means that there are things they need to be taught other than “the material” in order to help them become better learners. Unfortunately, many of them come away feeling like they don’t have what it takes to be physicists (as though there is some intrinsic “physicsness” that they are lacking) and so they leave the field.
- The typical introductory physics sequence, at least at Berkeley, is very isolating for potential physics majors. The vast majority of people in those classes are engineering students who are there because their departments require that they take physics; they have largely no interest in physics for its own sake. This makes it very difficult for potential physics majors to identify each other — they are like needles in an apathetic haystack. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that even the physics department cannot identify these potential majors. So, these students end up isolated from the department, from upperclassmen physics majors, and from each other – that is to say, from the physics community – for the three semesters it takes them to get through introductory physics. However, an important part of the excitement of physics is the collaboration with peers, the shared goal of building knowledge through interaction and discussion and asking “What if”. Without that, it’s incredibly difficult to paint physics as an interesting field, to really sell the idea of being physicists to these students beyond the level that NOVA can, and so they leave the field.
- The problems of interaction and perceived lack of “physicsness” are magnified for a certain set of students: women and underrepresented minorities. At this point, so much has been said about the lack of women and minorities in all levels of physics due to the “leaky pipeline” that I don’t have much to add to the subject. For this discussion, the important point to note is that in addition to the issues that their well-represented peers also face, they have to face majoring in a field where they don’t see people like themselves. They arrive at the seemingly logical but erroneous conclusion that success in physics is unattainable unless you are a white male, and so they leave the field.
So, here are three of many reasons why undergrads might leave the field of physics – notice that none of these reasons have anything to do with these students’ ability to be good physicists. If the physics community wants to recruit the best minds into its ranks, it stands to reason that these impediments must be removed, but not enough people seem interested in doing so. Hence, my frustration.
[More below the fold…]
Well, kiddo: you’re frustrated, and it even sounds like your frustrations are reasonable (at least to me, since you and I are the same person). What good is that going to do? Were I alone in my frustration, probably nothing. However, it turns out that I wasn’t alone: there were other grad students around me who were also frustrated, and for similar reasons. Three of them found each other, and decided to do something about the problems that they saw: they started to work on creating a program called The Compass Project during the summer of 2006, and I joined the project a year later.
So, what is Compass? At its core, The Compass Project is a program whose goal is to address all of these problems, both on the undergraduate and graduate level, with the ultimate aim of strengthening the physical sciences at Berkeley (I admit, we are a little bit ambitious). Central to our work is a two-week summer program for incoming Berkeley freshmen who are interested in the physical sciences (targeted at women and underrepresented minorities). The summer program addresses many of the issues I outlined above:
- By bringing together a set of 15-20 incoming freshmen for an intense two-week education experience, Compass starts the process of forming the network of peer interaction and support that doesn’t form during the intro physics sequence.
- Compass’s teaching methodology focuses very heavily on collaborative learning and group work. The Compass instructors (who are all grad students – more on this later), act more as guides helping the students answer a realistic physical question (for our pilot year, the question was “What do earthquakes tell us about the interior of the Earth?”), rather than an authoritarian source of all knowledge. We focus on building problem-solving and model-building skills in our students, which are skills not explicitly address in traditional physics classes.
- Compass introduces these students to the physics department very quickly. Through interaction with the Compass grad students, the Compass undergrads learn that physicists are real people, with real problems and real struggles, just like them. They get the message that they are valued members of the physics community as soon as they arrive on campus, and many of them choose to self-identify as physics majors before their first semester is done. We hope that as Compass grows, this sense of ownership will lead future Compass students to act as nuclei in their intro classes around which potential majors who were not in Compass can aggregate.
- The curriculum for the summer program is developed and implemented entirely by grad students. This means that Compass provides a tremendous opportunity for grad students involved in the program to hone their teaching skills in ways that simply aren’t possible without that level of freedom and control. Additionally, Compass provides a space where a passion for teaching is actually valued and encouraged, and therefore serves as a seed for the creation of a community of grad students. For many (including me!), the friendships formed through that community are invaluable for actually making it through grad school.
As though the summer program didn’t already keep us all busy, Compass also has several components that extend throughout the academic year, with the goal of supporting the Compass undergrads throughout their academic careers. Among those are (1) a mentorship program that pairs each Compass undergrad with a grad student to help them navigate the challenges of college, (2) a set of office hours, staffed by grad students and upperclassmen, to provide Compass students with academic help, (3) a lecture series where physics faculty describe their research at an undergrad level (this has been well-attended by Compass and non-Compass undergrads alike), and (4) pure social activities. So, yes, our goals are ambitious, but so are our methods for achieving those goals.
So, how can you help support this fantastic program? As I alluded to earlier, Compass was founded quite recently (our second summer program is happening this August!), and is entirely run by physics grad students. Right now, the main problem that Compass is facing at Berkeley is a lack of financial support (apparently times are tough in Sacramento as well as in DC), so we are trying to get the word out about our existence and the good work we are trying to do. So, if you think our program is worth supporting, spread the word! Tell your friends in important places about us, let us know if you are interested in hearing more or helping out, and, if you are able, donate some money to Compass. Every bit of help we can get is vital to keep this program going.
And if you happen to be a grad student at some school, and you happen to feel frustrated about these issues too, don’t despair. Consider starting a program similar to Compass at your school (and by all means, tell us about it). You’d be surprised how many good things your frustration can create.
Re 48:
Making a profit is not, in and of itself a bad thing. One could argue that it’s morally neutral, depending on how it’s obtained and for what purpose(s) it’s being used. If a university does not (at least in some sense) make a profit, then there are no facilities (e.g. buildings, libraries, or lab space) to support the faculty who teach the students who pay tuition, and who increase the basic store of human knowledge, no matter how trivial it might be (cf William Briggs’ most recent blog posting). This is true of all universities, tho’ more true of private universities, which are generally all soft money. It’s my experience that faculty are generally isolated from this aspect (e.g. they never have to go begging to alumni) and therefore can retain the fiction that what they do is completely divorced from economic realities. It’s simply not true.
I disagree that a requirement for a Ph.D should involve teaching. I particularly (and strongly) disagree with this:
“The damage done to grad students is fairly obvious. First of all, if they are not provided with encouragement and avenues to become better teachers, then they won’t improve their teaching skills as well as they could have. If you happen to believe that an essential part of being a physicist is the ability to pass physics on to future generations of students, to inspire them to follow in the footsteps of their intellectual ancestors, then it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability to do just that. Of course, this happens all the time.”
1. Not all graduate students end up as professors of any sort. In fact most of
them probably don’t and end up leaving academia.
2. Although there is a great deal of stuff said about the importance of teaching
(mostly by tenured faculty members), most of it is blatantly hypocritical.
Teaching is usually not given its due in academia (especially in the junior
ranks of the professoriate).
3. Be careful what you ask for, graduate student teaching requirements can
always be used to shift the burden of teaching on students and adjunct
faculty as has happened in the humanities.
Finally (sorry for the double post), this stuff about “seriousness” is a narrowminded attitude. A good physics graduate degree can be useful for a lot more than academic research. Given the realities of the academic job market, it would be highly disingenuous to both encourage increased enrollment in physics graduate school and cultivate this culture of “seriousness”. I think physics departments would be better off recognizing the reality that most of their doctorates will be held by people who will have to find jobs outside academia, rather than pretending that every student of theirs should have academic jobs as their only (or primary) goal. Instead of making graduate students satisfy teaching requirements, they would be better of helping the transition of those of their students who want to leave academia after graduation.
Andy said:
“Now, I can’t think of anyone who’s been able to explain string theory to undergrads. What does that tell us?”
On the other hand, Peter Woit said:
“A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach, based on a course on string theory for undergraduates taught at MIT….The whole idea of trying to teach a very speculative theory that hasn’t really worked and which is based on 2d quantum field theory to undergraduates seems to me to be utter lunacy.”
Man, I guess you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t!
kris
I would agree that teaching should not be a requirement for a PhD. Having teaching experience is something that should be controlled by demand. Universities should definitely offer grads teaching opportunities, if the grad intends on applying for a teaching position at a university, than it would probably be in there interest in gaining that experience through their own initiative.
“Teaching” is merely an art that can be taught to anyone in a relatively short time. The Navy still runs a school that “teaches” people to “teach” in a matter of weeks. The biggest takeaways are
1)Always face the class when speaking
2)Erase the board using up-and-down motion instead of side-to-side motion (side-to-side causes your butt to shake)
3)Throw erasers at people who are sleeping in your class and tell them to stand in the back of the room.
Costanza,
A university is in some ways like a company. It is also in some ways like a high school, a monastery, a political party or a sports team. In fact though it is none of the above, but is instead a university.
Neither a monastery nor a sports team is divorced from economic reality either -the monks still need to eat and the football players need somewhere to play. However in neither case is the purpose of the institution to make money for their shareholders.
A university needs money to pay its faculty and repair its buildings, but the success of a university is not measured by how much ‘profit’ it makes or how big its endowment is. The size of Harvard’s endowment does not a priori tell you anything about how good a university Harvard is.
piscator
This is such an old debate. The whole ‘my proffessors suck at teaching’ schtick has pretty much always existed in academia, and despite the best efforts to change things it amounts to a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Like it or not, teaching is a gift and it can’t really be taught past a certain point. You can get better at it sure, but some people will never be Sidney Coleman despite all the effort in the world.
Should those people be excluded? No. B/c they likely have been selected for outstanding research, which is and should always be the number one priority.
Some departments have special ‘lecturer’ positions devoted entirely to just that, and that helps. But keep in mind, thats money spent on a person who statistically isn’t going to be as qualified in research or at least spends most of his time teaching.
In the end, I prefer solutions like the one the OP has created. Practical, student driven and without a negative impact on the university perse.
This is a load of bull. Yes, there are those people who can be good at physics without being taught anything, but the field would be in a sad state indeed if those were the only people who could “amount to anything.” I can personally say that when I arrived as an undergrad at MIT, I struggled a little with the intro physics major version of mechanics because I had come from a high school education in which physics and calculus were not considered to be related subjects and physics was an exercise in looking up and applying formulas. Thanks to having good teachers and wonderful study group, I mastered those problem-solving skills, and am now one of the top students in the major. I will never be the next Einstein, but I hardly think that because my understanding of physics was founded in good teaching, that I will become an utter failure in life.
On a slightly different tack, I think improving the quality of physics education across the board would have wonderful effects, beyond just the physics majors. I’ve always seen physics to be a love-it-or-hate-it subject among my classmates (with the hate-it’s winning by a long shot), and I think the teaching is at fault. If students learned the problem-solving skills necessary to understand and appreciate physics, even if they ultimately decide that their true calling is biology or political science, just imagine the consequences. On the small scale, people wouldn’t be conned into buying Bluetooth headsets because they saw a video on YouTube where some dudes apparently popped a few kernels of popcorn with four cell phones. On the grand scale, imagine if our nation’s policy makers had all received good, quality education in the sciences. I personally think that would cut down on the rather large number of stupid and uninformed decisions made at that level, don’t you?
So yeah, maybe the best of the best never will need those great educators, but quality education of those in the many levels below them is nothing to take lightly.
I think teaching college students to read is far more important than teaching.
If the average college undergrad (including physics undergrads) were actually taught how to read the textbooks they are required to buy, and then actually spent 2-3 hours reading the text book for every hour the spent in class, I think their would a lot less whining.
The reality is that a college degree is a bullet on a resume. University’s sole purpose is to act as a filter for industry/government/academia. Most of the filtering happens at the admission level.
Research is by far more important than teaching. Good students will crack open the book and ask a good research professor valid questions. There is little incentive or need to invest a lot of time in someone who isn’t actually going to take the time from their busy social life to study.
For all those people out there who think that they are owed something, and that they study hard and still get no where, either:
1) You are full of BS
or
2) You need to face reality and find a job in retail (this is especially good advice since the service industry is 70% of the economy, and the sooner you start, the better of you’ll be)
p.s.
Yes there are spelling errors…damn
Snotnose kid, does it occur to you that some people might not be able to learn just from books? If everyone was able to understand perfectly anything they read in a textbook, there would be no point in having classes in anything at all. Personally, I have a much harder time teaching myself material from the textbook when I’ve missed class than from lecture, and attending lecture beforehand helps me follow the textbook better.
Furthermore, a textbook can’t answer your questions, and not all textbooks are well-written or easy to follow. Just as there are good and poor teachers, there are good and poor textbook writers (and they don’t necessarily coincide). On the same note, I think a professor who actually cares about teaching would be more likely to put in the time and effort to find a good textbook.
Clara
let me restate the previous
“Good students will crack open the book and ask a good research professor valid questions.”
Are you owed a good lecturer? In many cases the lecturer’s grasp of material is not much greater than the student’s.
This is simply a reality of statistics. Good lecturers are a rare commodity, good lecturers that actually have full mastery of the material are even rarer.
In my own experience, after spending time actually reading the books I have, it became pretty apparent that the reason that most lecturers don’t teach out of the book is that they don’t understand it as well as they should.
Are there a lot of poorly written books? Absolutely. Do you know how many books I have on QM alone? I know I have at least 7.
Calculus and DFQ’s? At least 9.
Teaching is another issue. A good teacher is one that takes control of a classroom and doesn’t look like a fool in front of the students. Ever wonder why good teachers don’t let themselves get dragged down by questions? Why they will eventually tell a troublesome student to come see them after class? Its because they understand that showing their control over the class is by far important than total mastery of the material. A good teacher also knows how to kick the can down the road (ever been told who you need to talk to, or what book to read in order to find the answer to your question?).
Seek and you shall find answers, that is where personal initiative plays a big part. There are probably fewer than 10,000 individuals in the world at any one time who have the level of mastery of physics that is expected by students. Everyone wants to be taught by a Feynman or a Boltzmann. Odds are that unless you have been lucky enough to become a graduate student at a top university, you will never have an instructor that meets the expectation.
You are on your own.
Read up, young person, read up.
snotnose kid, I think you are way off the mark here. I’ve met physics lecturers at hundreds of universities, ranging from major research universities, to tiny teaching colleges, from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, and without doubt they understood the physics they were teaching extremely well, and certainly much better than the students they taught did. Whether they were able to teach the material well is an entirely other matter.
I don’t take issue with the sentiment that individual work time is crucial, and that many students neglect it, and I certainly think that research is the primary reason why many of us do what we do (and, indeed, were hired and tenured), but it doesn’t mean one shouldn’t put some effort into being a good teacher.
I agree with Mark, and I have to say, Snotnose Kid, I really don’t understand your championing of books over lectures. Aren’t textbooks just lectures in written form? I mean, yeah, it’s a good thing to have some personal initiative and read stuff on your own, but students don’t pay $40,000 a year for people to tell them which textbooks to buy.
Ok, I agree that not everyone gets to be taught by a Feynmann or a Boltzmann, but that doesn’t mean that you have to give up on finding a good instructor. The greatest minds aren’t necessarily the best teachers.
Also, you said a good student will ask a research professor valid questions… but part of the point is that many professors view students not as an opportunity to educate the next generation of researchers, but as nuisances that cannot be avoided. No matter how much initiative students show, they won’t get anywhere if none of their professors are interested in teaching.
IRT Clara
“I really don’t understand your championing of books over lectures. Aren’t textbooks just lectures in written form?”
If this statement were true, than the appropriate rebuttal questions would be:
If all textbooks are lectures, than why do we need lecturers? Can’t you just read the book?
“but part of the point is that many professors view students not as an opportunity to educate the next generation of researchers, but as nuisances that cannot be avoided.”
Most students are nuisances that cannot be avoided. How many students ever bothered to ask a researcher what they are actually working on? Or volunteer to help out? I bet it’s less than 1 in 100, maybe even less than 1 in 500.
“but students don’t pay $40,000 a year for people to tell them which textbooks to buy”
You are correct. Students pay $40,000 dollars when they can’t get a scholarship, and they really need that bullitt on their resume.
IRT Mark
“I’ve met physics lecturers at hundreds of universities…”
Isn’t that exaggerating a little…who funds trips to hundreds of universities?
I meant from hundreds of universities (as in people who lecture at hundreds of universities. And no, it isn’t an exaggeration. Seventeen years of attending workshops, conferences, summer schools, symposia, seminars and colloquia make this an easy claim to make.
Is this sampling with or without replacement?
Mark
On a side note, I was looking for new books to supplement my copy of Gravitation and appreciated your recommendation of Andrew Liddle’s book. It and the book by Dodelson (which Amazon recommended) will be fine additions to my library.
Hi Joel,
I just thought I’d chime in to offer my support. You’re definitely not alone in wanting more balance between research and education in the graduate years. In fact, the NSF is officially on board as a supporter of that – that’s the idea, in part, behind the “broader impacts” criterion used to evaluate all NSF proposals. Now, there’s a lot of room to debate how that could be made to work better in practice, but it’s encouraging at least to see such high-level emphasis on the dissemination of knowledge as well as its production.
And for the sake of disclosure: I’m a bit biased here as an NSF-supported postdoc. The NSF’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship program is the only one of the major national prize astronomy fellowships to require a substantial education and outreach component to the proposal. I cannot recommend it strongly enough for any aspiring astronomy educators out there! Our annual meetings each year (held immediately before the AAS meeting in January) always include discussions of both current research and education projects, with keynote invited speakers generally including some of the ‘big names’ in astronomy education. These meetings are open to the entire astronomical community, especially including graduate students and potential Fellows. I’m organizing the next one in Long Beach in January 2009, and would invite all of you to come join us!
The Compass program that you describe sounds like a great addition. Every department should have something like that. On the astronomy side and local to California, the Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC has been running an education-focused Professional Development Workshop for grad students and postdocs every spring for some years now (again sponsored by the NSF). It was at the 2002 CFAO PDW that I myself was first really exposed to the academic literature on science teaching, which was a tremendously eye-opening experience and has shaped my outlook ever since. Here at UCLA, my colleague Nate McCrady just ran a 1-quarter seminar on science education for the department’s grad students, which went superbly well in my opinion. I wish that all grad students could have the opportunity to attend something like that.
Switching to a different topic: I completely concur with you about the importance of building a supportive community for undergraduates. In the Berkeley Astronomy department, this is something that’s taken very seriously, and the junior-level undergraduate lab class is specifically designed to encourage this collaboration. (That’s a large part of why undergrads all get after-hours access to the lab, which includes sofas and work tables as well as computers, and we encourage them to use it as a shared space to work on problem sets and even just hang out with other majors.) It’s a shame nothing like this has been implemented in physics! Interestingly, the anecdotal evidence is that the lab class has been especially effective at encouraging women to stick with the astronomy major. Community matters tremendously!
Feynman was one of those rare masters who had both an astounding command of the physics and the storyteller’s art in crafting it into a compelling lecture. But not all great physicists are also great educators! When I was an undergrad at Harvard in the late 90s, the consensus wisdom was very much “avoid anything taught by Sheldon Glashow like the plague”. Now, I can’t speak to whether his lecture style was really that bad or not, since I followed that advice wholeheartedly, but clearly, there are plenty of brilliant physicists out there who should be encouraged to focus on research and not teaching – and likewise, plenty of brilliant educators who should be encouraged in their teaching, and not evaluated solely on their research output. The academic enterprise needs all types.
I think the advantage of lecturers over books is that they can a) answer your questions, and b), as previously mentioned, offer information in a different way. The idea is to read the books AND go to lecture.
And what does it matter if a student asks a research professor about their research if no one bothered to teach them well enough that they could understand what the research is about?
IRT Clara
“I think the advantage of lecturers over books is that they can a) answer your questions,”
let me restate the previous
“Good students will crack open the book and ask a good research professor valid questions.”
“b), as previously mentioned, offer information in a different way. ”
and I’ll also restate
“most lecturers don’t teach out of the book is that they don’t understand it as well as they should.”
“And what does it matter if a student asks a research professor about their research if no one bothered to teach them well enough that they could understand what the research is about?”
which brings me full circle
“If the average college undergrad (including physics undergrads) were actually taught how to read the textbooks they are required to buy, and then actually spent 2-3 hours reading the text book for every hour the spent in class, I think their would a lot less whining.”
IRT Marshall Perrin
My personal experiences have led me to associate the word “community” with the word “gang”. Eventually, the whole thing degrades to beating up people who are different, and mindless banter about who is sleeping with who.
The history of physics is about building institutions around a few individuals who spend most of their time in isolation with pencils, paper, books and some various other correspondence.
second restatement was truncated…sorry
“the reason that most lecturers don’t teach out of the book is that they don’t understand it as well as they should.”
I agree with snotnose kid that the value of lectures is overstated. They ae only important because many students, when they arrive at university, are not yet used to studying directly from textbooks.
A typical college lecture will contain not much more than what yo can read in textbooks (perhaps even less). But if we were to say to the students: “Here are your books, the exam is in three months from now”, then many students will look at their books of many hundreds of pages and think: “Gosh, how on earth am I going to work my way through that book?”
So, what the lectures do is to break up the stuff the student need to learn into small managable parts. This is not enough for the students to master what they have learned, they need to work on problems etc.
But gradually the students will have to learn to study for themselves. Otherwise they can never become researchers. So, I think that in high school the students should be taught these studying skills. Then one could abolish lectures. Professors could then focus more on problem sessions which is where you really learn physics.
Wow, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had such negative experiences. I certainly don’t wish to come across as disagreeing with your description of your own experiences, but allow me to say that mine have been extraordinarily different. None of the academic communities I’ve been a part of have ever degenerated into “mindless banter about who is sleeping with whom.” Have you never been lucky enough to have a research partner who you can bounce ideas back and forth with? Never had a friend and colleague who encouraged you to keep working on some particularly challenging problem, or offered an insight that let you move ahead? If so, that’s a real shame.
Tell that to to folks who found the top quark, or discovered the acceleration of the universe, or developed the semiconductor physics that launched the electronics revolution. Large collaborations and broad communities of scientists, in all cases! Some physics is done by brilliant individuals working alone, certainly, but nowhere near all.
IRT Count Iblis
I think the model you propose is the most efficient to date. I would agree that most freshmen have no organization or prioritization skills.
IRT Marshall Perrin
“Have you never been lucky enough to have a research partner who you can bounce ideas back and forth with? Never had a friend and colleague who encouraged you to keep working on some particularly challenging problem, or offered an insight that let you move ahead?”
–My colleagues are professionals, and I don’t know what my friends think of each other, and I really don’t care.–
“Tell that to to folks who found the top quark, or discovered the acceleration of the universe, or developed the semiconductor physics that launched the electronics revolution.”
–I have a list of five names, one of which you should recognize. I would recommend you look each of them up.
Martinus Veltman
Julius Lilienfeld
Jack Kilby
Robert Noyce
Willem de Sitter
I think Veltman’s story is of particular interest.–