My Favorite Method of Teaching 4

We all know of teachers/professors who are very knowledgeable in their subjects but are lousy teachers. Very few people dare criticize them because they are so knowledgeable in their subjects (and for other reasons of course).

The inescapable point is this: when they come to teach a class at a certain low level say, the only thing that matters is how well they are able to teach stuff at that low level. They may be absolute geniuses at higher levels and may see the relevance of the lower level to higher levels like no one else but none of these matter. If they do a lousy job in helping the students learn the lower level stuff, they shouldn't be teaching it. நெற்றி கண்ணை திறந்தாலும் குற்றம் குற்றமே.

I was reading recently about an absolute genius in physics called Julian Schwinger. Enough positives cannot be said about him. [Some interesting asides about him: He himself was flunking out his undergraduate studies at City College of New York (CCNY). This was because he did nothing for his humanities courses. The Nobel Prize winner I.I.Rabi had seen one of the physics papers Schwinger had written and persuaded his own university Columbia - which is several levels above CCNY-- to admit him. Columbia resisted. Rabi got some visiting professors to read Schwinger's paper and make a recommendation to Columbia. Finally Schwinger was admitted to Columbia. Columbia University is a very rough place. There are stories that professors there would walk around wearing a "Not Yet" tag on their shirt lapels (meaning "Not won the Nobel Prize yet").]

Schwinger did extraordinarily well at Columbia University. He had finished all his PhD work by the time he finished his undergraduate work. He won the Nobel prize himself and became a full professor by the time he was 29. About 70 people got their PhD's with him. Four of his PhD students got Nobel prizes. (This included Glauber. There was a controversy that India's George Sudharshan should have gotten a share of this particular Nobel Prize.) As I have written above, it is hard to overpraise him.

Why include him in this particular blog entry? Because of his teaching techniques. He was undeniably a star. People stood in lines to sign up for his classes. He used no notes in his classes. He derived incredibly complicated stuff on the spot, ex tempore. However, he didn't like being asked questions. It was a show, a performance. It did not help his students. They would have been better off with someone with 1/10 th of Schwinger's knowledge but who was able to help the students get from their level to the next higher level. A show is not what students need.