Re: Teaching quality thread

[Steve Luzader <sluzader@fre.fsu.umd.edu>]

Bob Beichner's comments prompted me to send some recollections
of my school days, which was a long time ago.  As I recall, the
"best" (i.e. most effective) teachers I had were the ones who made
us do the most work.  There are four that stick in my mind after all
these years:  One was my freshman chemistry professor; another was
my introductory physics professor (in those days intro physics was
taken in the sophomore year, _after_ an introduction to calculus); 
the third was the math professor who taught differential equations;
and the fourth was the person who taught mechanics.  All of the 
courses were "traditional" lecture format, which was the norm in
the early and mid 60's. Three of the professors were excellent
lecturers who managed to be organized, erudite, and occasionally
entertaining.  The other person was not bad as a lecturere, but not
in the same category as the other three.  (I won't identify which
was which...)  The thing that made the courses particularly good
learning experiences was the amount of outside work ("homework", which
seems to be a dirty word these days) that was assigned.  I
guess my classmates and I were such wimps that when we were given
large homework assignments, we just did our best to complete them rather
than complaining that too much work was being dumped on us
(which is a comment I get frequently from students _and_ faculty
these days).

Bob Beichner wrote:

> This sounds like something out of "Alice in Wonderland!" What you are >saying is that the best teachers are the worst teachers. The less the 
> student understands from class the better they end up learning the 
> material because they have to learn it on their own. ...

Steve Luzader
Frostburg State University