Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool
I was thinking to myself as I read this article that if I had exams that tested comprehension of the concepts (as opposed to rote memorization of formulas and facts) I would have got straight A’s in all my classes and would probably have had a dramatically different life. Instead of always being a mediocre (at best) student always struggling to pass exams (one example I like to give: for a physical chemistry exam we needed to memorize about 14 formulas. I copied them over and over again as well as studying them intently, then when I got the exam, I put my sheet away and copied from memory onto the back of the exam all the formulas. I got about half of the formulas wrong, thus failed the test.) I would have been one of the stellar students and top in my class at high school. That, naturally, would have totally changed my educational trajectory and given my native interest in research I probably would have easily gone on to get a couple of PhDs and been taken seriously when I suggested lines of novel research, some of which very likely (at least given the success other people who have had the resources to act on the exact same ideas I have had) would have been successful. Man it sucks to be me!
I really like this quote regarding lectures… Why the heck should anyone need to actually attend class to get the lecture and why shouldn’t we all be watching the same lecture on video? No rational person can possibly believe that each and every lecturer in the country is equally superior and capable!
“With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it,” Redish says. “Get ’em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”
Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don’t have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.
“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”
Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.
This comes way too late to help me, but given the massive inertia in our educational industrial complex I suspect it is also too late to help my boy, since he is already in second grade.
