Re: [Phys-L] writing your notes and/or text

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 06/29/2013 06:31 PM, Richard Tarara wrote in part:

> > Let me suggest that we go back in the thread a bit and look to what
> > I think is really important in a good formal education--the ability
> > to keep learning.
> > ....
> >
> > The point here is that the skills for LIFELONG LEARNING are really
> > what are the key things to take from a formal education.

Agreed!

On 07/04/2013 07:13 AM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
> For the first time this fall, I will not be using a book. I used them in
> the past, but students never read them. Waste of money. I have my own
> notes that I've been giving my students for years. These are clear,
> compact, and concise. I supplement the course with MC and math. Much
> better than any textbook -- in print or online -- can offer. Student have
> given me much positive feedback...

Also on 07/04/2013 12:39 PM ....
> My notes are really
> a short summary (like Cliffs Notes) of the essential points in a given
> topic, with no diagrams or sketches.

I'm trying to reconcile "lifelong learning" with the idea of NTAA
(no text at all).  This is important, but tricky.  For starters, it 
appears we are having approximately four different conversations:

1) Where do things stand at the moment?

2) What simple, expedient steps can we take in the short term
 that might make things better?

3) Where do we want to wind up in the long run?

4) What steps can we take that will get us where we want to be?

======

There seems to be something of a consensus that the present-day
textbooks are terrible.  If they are so bad that using no text 
at all is a viable option, that's quite a harsh indictment.

  I don't think anybody is arguing that NTAA is ideal.  It's a 
  tradeoff.  We need to weigh the advantages against the 
  disadvantages.

Let's start with the diagrams.  Even a lousy text will have some
useful diagrams.  For example, electric field line diagrams are 
important but hard to sketch accurately and also hard to compute 
without specialized tools.  You can google for them, but even
that can be painfully time-consuming, and sometimes unsuccessful.

  One could argue that in the available books, the diagrams are
  so lousy and so few as to be not worth the price of the book.
  However, I'm not sure that's an argument for NTAA.  It might
  be taken as an argument for better and/or cheaper books.

>  My notes ...... no diagrams or sketches.

I understand where that's coming from.  Making one good diagram 
can easily take the better part of a day.  Making all the diagrams 
for a year-long course could easily take all year, even if you
had no other duties such as actually teaching in the classroom.

On the other hand, students need to see the diagrams.  A big
part of science -- and business and lots of other things --
involves communicating using diagrams.  It's not easy, but
it needs to be done.

We can go even further with that thought: 
We agree that _lifelong learning_ is super important.  However, 
the students aren't going to get very far in that direction
without strong reading skills.  One would think that being
able to read a book would be an admission requirement for 
the physics course ... and failing that, one would certainly 
hope it would be a completion requirement.

Reading a physics book is not like reading Lemony Snicket.
There are techniques involved.  Nobody was born knowing how
to do this, but if they haven't learned it by the time they
get to high-school physics, it's high time they learned.
Some students don't know how and some /can't be bothered/
to study the book.  It's hard to tell which is which, but in
some sense it doesn't matter.  Either way, it's not OK.  If 
you tell them it's OK, you're not really doing them a favor.
They'll suffer for it in the long run.

> Student have given me much positive feedback...

Note the contrast between being and seeming:
  a) Making the job /be/ easier, by learning how to do the
   whole job as easily and efficiently as possible.
  b) Making the job /seem/ easier, by neglecting major 
   parts of the job.

Students are notoriously bad at making judgments involving
short-term gratification versus long-term wellbeing.  Doing
what's most popular in the short term is often not good
educational policy.

Let me cut to the chase:  We all know what we want:  To a 
first approximation, we want some decent texts for the 
students and decent presentation materials for the teacher
to use.  (At this level of detail, I don't much care whether 
the texts are distributed as hard copies or online.  However, 
the presentation materials need to be open-source, so they 
can be modified.)

Let's take a step back and look at the educational system as
a /system/.  It seems to me the system is grossly mismanaged.
Look at the time and effort wasted as teachers here and there
prepare presentation materials and handouts.  It would be much 
more efficient if they had good materials to rely on.  If they
want to make modifications, that's fine, but they should have
something to use as a starting point.

Seriously:  Suppose you were managing the educational system.
You would hire somebody to prepare and distribute decent 
materials.  This would save a ton of money out of your budget,
and would make everybody happier.

We know a lower bound on what it takes to prepare high-quality 
textbooks and supporting materials.  In the 1960s, we saw
projects such as (a) the Feynman Lectures and (b) PSSC.  These
involved large teams of top-notch people and spanned several 
years.  In contrast, right now we have thousands of much smaller 
efforts, all starved for resources, few of which have wide
impact.  This kind of dissipation of effort is instantly 
recognizable as gross mismanagement.

Let's consider the following hypothetical scenario:  Somebody
puts together a modern-day reincarnation of PSSC.  Get some
characters with the qualifications and the energy of Feynman,
Leighton, Vogt, Zacharias, Rogers, Gamow, Weisskopf and the
many lesser-known folks who were part of the 1960s efforts.

If we come up with decent materials /that actually get used/
the effort will pay for itself a gazillion times over.

  Let's be clear:  This is why you need good management:
  One project that has major impact is a huuugely better
  investment than a thousand little projects that have
  little or no impact.

Alas there is a problem with this scenario that I don't 
entirely know how to solve.  The history of PSSC serves as 
a cautionary tale.  If we did come up with at book that was
not wrong and not 100 years out of date, I cannot be sure
that it would be widely adopted.  There are a lot of folks 
out there who would give such a book little more than a 
sniff.  Today, most teachers already have more hassles 
than they can deal with, and the last thing they want is 
anything new or different.

And that's just the one-person-at-a-time inertia.  On top
of that, we have institutionalized inertia, especially in
the public schools.  There are committees running around
promulgating brain-dead standards.  The standards drive
the even-more-brain-dead tests.  The tests constrain the
textbooks.  And then the textbooks influence the next
generation of standards.  All in all, we have a vicious 
circle of inertia, festering in a bureaucratic Petri dish, 
devoid of any connection to modern physics, modern pedagogy,
real-world applications, or common sense.

In addition:  Certain people talk-talk-talk about the
importance of lifelong learning, and talk-talk-talk about
critical thinking ... yet when you ask them to take even
the simplest steps in that direction, they won't do it.
They're addicted to ritual, rote, regimentation, and 
Kadavergehorsamkeit.

=========

I'm an optimist.  The problems seem solvable.  Maybe not
solvable overnight, but solvable over time.  Vastly larger 
and trickier problems get solved every day.  Examples
include:
 ++ Think of the money, creativity, and attention to detail 
  that go into making a Hollywood movie.  There are people 
  who know how to do this. 
 ++ Think of what it takes to build and operate a big
  science project such as the LHC or the human genome
  project.  There are skilled scientists involved ... 
  and also skilled managers.
 -- In contrast, textbook writing is largely managed by
  the publishing industry.  Most of these guys don't know
  how to manage anything.  Their traditions and policies 
  are geared toward the solitary novelist living in a
  garret.  They have 100 times more would-be authors
  sending them manuscripts than they know what to do
  with.  What they don't understand is that writing a
  good textbook (and the supporting materials) is about 
  100 times harder than writing a novel.  It's easier than 
  producing a Hollywood movie, but a whole lot harder than 
  writing a novel.  Publishing-industry policies perpetuate 
  the dissipation of effort.  They give us an unlimited
  supply of lousy books, when what we need is a smallish
  number of good books.
 -- The only management I've seen that is worse than
  the publishing industry is in the educational system.
  In business, in the military, in sports, in industrial
  R&D labs, in almost everything you can think of, 
  management appreciates the value of teamwork.  In
  contrast, all too often, teachers are left to fend 
  for themselves ... such as writing their own notes.
  There is precious little incentive --  and often
  precious little opportunity -- for teamwork.

  In particular:  Why should one guy share his notes
  with the next guy?  There's no incentive.

Any halfway-competent manager would not tolerate such 
a situation.  Instead the manager would call people
together and say:  One guy prepares some high-quality
notes for the first topic.  I don't care if it takes
five times as long as the rough notes, just do it.
The next guy prepares high-quality notes for the
second topic.  And so on.  Then everybody shares the
results.  If each of them does five times as much work
per topic, but the work is divided ten ways, it's a
huge win.  Now imagine scaling it up so that the work
is divided a hundred ways, or five thousand ways.  There
are some inefficiencies, but when you are starting with
thousand-to-one leverage, you can afford to have a
little bit of friction here and there.

I think some of the MOOCs are on the verge of figuring 
this out.  I've been making this prediction for about
20 years.  I've been wrong 19 times in a row, but sooner
or later it's going to come true.

Heretofore most MOOCs have been college-level courses,
but high-school level courses are starting to pop up.
Example:
   http://umga.miami.edu/high-school.aspx