Re: Pedagogy

[Stefan Jeglinski <jeglin@4PI.COM>]

> but my concern is:  is this good teaching?
>
> My main point is, if I have to do it myself, then why am I here?  Why attend
> class at all if all I'm going to see is a regurgitation of Marion on the
> black board?
>
> Maybe this is more clear :)

Indeed.

I would say that depending on the text adn  the teacher's style,
regurgitating it might actually be good teaching, in the same way
that some can learn by rote copying from a textbook to a piece of
paper. "Good teaching" is determined by each student that witnesses
the instructor do what he/she does.

Having said that, I did have a prof or two in grad school who taught
exactly this way. In retrospect, those courses now seem worthless to
me, but I didn't know any better at the time. Equally as bad was the
one StatMech prof who enjoyed teaching things that seemed to exist in
his mind and had never been written down anywhere, AFAICT. After
homework what was vaguely posed as thermo, a test might almost
entirely focus on calculating dice statistics.

Bad teaching is everywhere. But so is good, and so I have to answer
your central question with "no, you are not describing physics depts
across America."

Everything that can be said about it I experienced in E&M, 3 qtrs
taught from Jackson. the first two were taught by a Brazilian
postdoc, absolutely the best teacher I've ever had, bar none, ever.
But his funding ran out and he left (shades of the tuition/textbook
thread), leaving us with a 3rd qtr to be taught by a gentleman who
literally merely duplicated Jackson line by line on the board for 9
weeks, and assigned only problems out of Jackson, and whose basic
response to any questions were "you should have learned that in the
first 2 qtrs." Not that Jackson's problems lack insight or creativity
(or ease for that matter), but the overall style and utility of the
qtr were useless. Every student panned him on the eval but what did
he care, he had tenure. The Brazilian assigned Jackson problems but
also took the time to create problems that were incredibly insightful
and could not be found in any other text either :-). His lectures
always complemented Jackson's text, and he was always accessible. I
talked to him every day, because he had some magic power to make me
-want- to learn Jackson, an amazing feat.

Well, enough reminiscing. As other's have mentioned, I've never been
at an institution where what you describe was so complete across the
faculty. If it's -really- that way, then I think you can answer your
own questions. If -every- teacher merely regurgitates (or whatever),
and you don't learn from that, then of course you should question why
are you there. In fact, I would ask you the same thing - why are you
there? Few can stand elitism; the question is can you -live- with it?
If not, move on to one of the overwhelming majority of schools where
there is at worst a mix through which a student can navigate.

>     And then there is my all time favorite: When asking a prof about a
> problem the answer begins with " this is easy."

A number of my profs did this too. I ignored it and was able to learn
something anyway. Even if they were snotty or elitist, not one of
them ever said "this is easy, now go away." As for StatMech, I never
could have gone into that field with the teacher I had. But I did
learn something about dice...


Stefan Jeglinski