[Phys-L] Re: What students will do. (was: Physics Solutions Manual)

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

Feynman commented that his lectures were not effective in promoting
understanding.  Remember that members of this list are atypical, so what
students did then, or do now may not be well represented by our experiences.
Also the student population in the 40s was an extremely select group
compared to students now.  There is evidence from anecdotes that in the Ivy
League there was the concept of "gentleman's C", so I think that slacking
off in school and not doing the reading has been common even in the 40s.

However, that being said there is still no evidence that students really
learned the concepts in physics better in previous eras than they do now.
We can't go back and give them the FCI or FMCE.  So what type of evidence
could be gathered to substantiate any claims.  This might be an interesting
project, digging into old records to try to find out what students actually
understood back then.

BTW Feynman was a smart cookie when he recognized that students did not
understand concepts.  He attacked it the wrong way by trying to give better
lectures.  If he could have teamed with Karplus, perhaps we might have had
PER earlier.  He never realized that his paradigm of education was not
productive.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

>         OTOH: Feynman rarely, if ever, taught undergraduate classes, so
> what did he know?  The problem did not exist in the early '40's, when I
> went to school - the inverse, in fact.  I use to stay in and do my
> homework during the week-end, and cut the classes that merely repeated the
> assigned reading, while exploring life in the big city during the week.
> Also, the faculty could not be described as people who
> were part of the "problem".  I entered MIT only two years after Feynman
> left, so he was not describing the undergraduates of his time.
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