Re: [Phys-L] Commentary on teaching in Physics Today

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 03/09/2017 07:55 AM, Bill Norwood via Phys-l asked:

> 4. Might it be true that it doesn’t make much difference what one does in
> elementary school, high school or college, and that his or her education
> begins when commencing a career?

One can find examples and counterexamples, all over the map.

At one extreme:
 -- If Benjamin Franklin had received a decent education,
  he might have amounted to something.
 -- If Michael Faraday had received a decent education,
  he might have amounted to something.
 -- et cetera

Here's a more complex example:
 -- Albert Einstein had a low opinion of his grade-school
  education.  He called it Kadavergehorsamkeit.
 -- He applied to what is now ETH Zurich but was not
  admitted on his first try.
 ++ After some remedial work he was admitted, so he
  wound up with a first-rate educational opportunity.
 -- He got mediocre grades, in part because he cut
  classes a lot.  He got his diploma in July 1900.
 ++ He spent the time studying with tremendous intensity.
 ++ He met some people who would be lifelong friends and
  collaborators.

 From 1902 through 1909 he had a full-time job at the
 patent office in Bern.  The odd thing is that in 1905
 he submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Zurich,
 125 km away.  I don't know the details, but it's not
 obvious that he ever took classes there or otherwise
 studied there.

 All in all, it's complicated.  For sure the the important
 things he got from his education were not the main things
 the educational system was aiming for.

At another extreme, Richard Feynman went to MIT and then
to Princeton, studying under Wheeler.  It's hard to imagine
a more conventionally excellent education than that.  Grad
school was interrupted by a stint at Los Alamos, where he
hobnobbed with the likes of Bethe and Fermi.

=============

Here's a related question.  It is often said that every
scientist retains a childlike sense of wonderment and
inquisitiveness.

To that my first reaction is yes, of course ... and my
second reaction is Huh?  Childlike?  What the heck?

It's true that children start out inquisitive.  Then
typically they grow less inquisitive as they grow older.
Why is that?
  a) Is it just the natural order of things?
  b) Or does school beat the inquisitiveness out of them?

Maybe it's a little of both, but even so, school should
be pushing people toward more inquisitiveness, not less.
School should be the opposite of Kadavergehorsamkeit.

There's a tremendous problem here, and it starts early.
Once upon a time I was visiting a school in the high
desert.  There had been freezing rain overnight.  The
kids on the playground had evidently never seen icicles
before.  So I knocked down some icicles and passed them
out.  I was worried that there was going to be a riot,
and that somebody would get trampled, possibly me.  They
held the ice in their hands and watched it melt.  Then
I discovered a canvas canopy holding big chunks of ice,
which I knocked down and passed out.  The kids put them
on the metal tables and pushed them back and forth,
like reverse hockey pucks.  They marveled at the fact
that even when it was moving very slowly, the ice kept
moving in a straight line.

Then the teacher showed up and took everybody inside
so they could take their daily math test.

Imagine my reaction.  Just imagine.

I was on my best behavior, so I bit my lip.  I did not
say a word, but here's what I wanted to say: These kids
are learning about heat and temperature and change of
phase and meteorology and friction and Galilean kinematics.
They are squealing with excitement.  There is nothing you
could do in the next ten minutes or the next ten days that
is more valuable than this.  However, this school is so
regimented that you are obliged to drag then inside for
a math test?  In kindergarten?  A test that makes some
kids cry every day because it's too hard for them?  In
kindergarten?!?!?!?!!!!

In this school, teaching is a blue-collar job, not a
profession.  By definition, a professional would have
enough scope to improvise in a situation like this.

Just to add injury to mayhem, this is considered a "good"
school, because the students do well on the state-mandated
multiple-guess tests.

These are fixable problems!

You could start by hiring teachers who know what they're
doing and treating them like professionals.

========================

Once upon a time I was helping a kid with his Spanish 
homework.  He had translated a particular word in an 
awkward way.  I suggested an alternative that was more
fluent, and indeed provably more correct.

He declined the suggestion.  He explained that in the
mini-dictionary in the back of the book, there was only
one translation, and he had used that.  I said look, the
teacher speaks Spanish.  She will know this is a better
translation.  He replied, well, maybe, but everybody else
in the class is going to translate it this way.  By the
time she gets around to grading the papers, she will have
forgotten what the question was, so it doesn't matter
whether she speaks Spanish or not.  If I do it this way,
it will be marked correct.  If I do it any other way, it
might get marked wrong.  It's easier for the teacher if
all the correct papers look alike.  If it gets marked
wrong, I could argue the point and I might even win the
argument, but then I would get a reputation for being
argumentative, and that's not good.

At this point I told the kid he was right, and that I 
considered myself well and truly told off.  I apologized
for giving him bad advice.

On the other hand, I said we need to have two separate 
conversations.  On this side of the page you're telling
me how to do well in school, and you're right about 
that, and I'm not going to disagree even a little bit.
Regimentation marches on!  Kadavergehorsamkeit über alles!
Meanwhile, on the other side of the page, we can talk
about how to do well in real life.  In real life, you
should never use a small dictionary.  What's the point
of such a thing even existing?  Any word I don't know,
it doesn't know either.  If you're going to bother
looking up a word, look it up in the best dictionary
you can lay hands on.

In real life, when translating, you are much better off
using the correct translation and (almost always) using
the fluent translation rather than some mindless literal
translation.  I trust we agree that there's a big
difference between doing well in school and doing well
in real life.

=====

I don't want to go too far overboard, but to *some* extent,
people become scientists in spite of their early education,
not because of it.

This is a fixable problem.