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Re: Feynman (was pedagogy)



Jack Uretsky wrote:
Hi all-
I sent John D's remarks about Feynman to a colleague who was once
Feynman's TA. Here are John's remarks followed by my friend's comments:
John wrote:


When he was working problems at the blackboard, he
didn't just show the solution. He commented on the
method of solution as he went along, which is where
this story makes contact with the subject of this
message. He would often say "At this point, you
may be tempted to try XXX, but that's a trap. You
can recognize traps of this sort by noticing ....."

I was quite struck by that. It was not even a case
of RPF "remembering" what it was like to be a student,
because he was so $#@! smart that he had probably
never in his life fallen into the sort of trap he was
discussing.

It has been reported that Feynman looked up his IQ based on childhood
testing after winning the Nobel Prize. It was 125 -- not bad, but hardly
what one would expect for such a brilliant physicist.

__________________________________________________________________
The comment:
yes, of course, discussion and method are even superior to the actual
solution
to the problem in the first place...... after all, the problem itself is
there
to teach you methodology, and not the answer....
the scientific method....

as for feynman, i'll disagree: much of the time he was talking to himself,
or
some alter ego of himself,
around 11 yrs old, or his son, etc.... so he did not second guess the
naivete
of
his freshmen,
smart as he was: he Became a little kid in method acting and did ask all
the
naive and stupid questions
himself, fast and cleverly to be sure, but he asked them, and got
confused, and
got back, and
kicked himself and asked again, and backtracked and asked even more basic
questions.....
totally genuinely, and not as part of a pedagogical show.... and that's
what
stays with you if
you watched him: that it is OK to buzz and jump and backtrack and explore
improbable alleys,
mostly blind, but sometimes pure feynman paradoxical!


Regards,
Jack


This is not unlike the way Feynman's teacher, John A. Wheeler, described
his own teacher, Karl Herzfeld, who, I think, must have been one of the
greatest physics teachers of the twentieth century. Wheeler obtained his
Ph.D. under Herzfeld at The Johns Hopkins University in 1933.
On pp. 95-96 of his autobiography (with Kenneth Ford), _Geons, Black
Holes & Quantum Foam, A Life in Physics_, Norton, New York, 1998,
Wheeler writes about Herzfeld, " I sat in on his graduate seminars
beginning in my sophomore year and came away excited. Herzfeld began
every course, whatever the topic, with a broad overview of physics and a
discussion of the work of leading physicists. Then he showed how the
particular subject matter of the course fit into the bigger picture. His
lectures were not prepolished, gift-wrapped offerings; they were works
in progress. How wonderful to see him think on his feet, take issue with
himself, backtrack, and go forward again."

There is a good biographical sketch of Karl Herzfeld by Joseph Mulligan
at http://stills.nap.edu/html/biomems/kherzfeld.html . This complements
the vivid image that Wheeler paints of Herzfeld in his autobiography.

Hugh Logan
Retired physics teacher