CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the halls of academia, it is the rare senior professor who volunteers to teach basic science courses to undergraduates.
But Eric Mazur, the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard, is driven by a passion. He wants to end science illiteracy among the nation’s college students; specifically, he strives to open them to the “great beauties of physics.”Mazur’s own Harvard course, Physics 1b, is the kind of science class that even a literature student might love — playful, engaging, something like a trip to a science museum. Indeed, Dr. Mazur, 52, is as experimental in his classroom as he is in his research laboratory.
“It’s important to mentally engage students in what you’re teaching,” he explains. “We’re way too focused on facts and rote memorization and not on learning the process of doing science.”
Q. Why do you willingly teach an introductory physics course?
A. First, it’s part of my job description. Professors are supposed to teach. The problem is how we teach, particularly how we teach science to undergraduates.
From what I’ve seen, students in science classrooms throughout the country depend on the rote memorization of facts. I want to change this. The students who score high do so because they’ve learned how to regurgitate information on tests. On the whole, they haven’t understood the basic concepts behind the facts, which means they can’t apply them in the laboratory. Or in life.
There are a bunch of things about higher education that bother me, but near the top of my list is its seemingly endless obsession with requiring undergraduates to memorize and regurgitate facts. If I had a dollar for every time a student asked me "will this be on the exam" during a lecture I could retire. The point of lecturing shouldn't to transmit information that can be repeated at a later date. It should be to engage and inform the audience.
In the past, when I've brought this up with colleagues I've often been told that its hopeless - too many of the students, they say, simply aren't in college to learn. And I agree, for some students that is no doubt true. But bring the same subject up with students and you'll hear a very different story. Far too many professors, they will tell you, simply don't care about teaching undergrads, a fact made painfully obvious by the way they choose to teach.
Preparing engaging lectures isn't easy, but it can be done. And yes, it often requires an immense amount of preparation, but as Prof. Mazur says, teaching is part of the job description.
And then there's this:
Q. You permit students to take their textbooks into the final exam. Why?A. Life, you know, is an open book. They can bring any book they want to class. My objective is to see if they can solve a problem.
Open book, open note tests should be the rule, not the exception. The point of an exam shouldn't be to test your ability to memorize things; it should be to test your ability to synthesize and analyze the things you have learned over the course of a semester.
This part, however, I'm not so sure about:
Q. When you teach Physics 1b, do you give “fantastic performances?”
A. You know, I’ve come to think of professorial charisma as dangerous. I used to get fantastic evaluations because of charisma, not understanding. I’d have students give me high marks, but then say, “physics sucks.” Today, by having the students work out the physics problems with each other, the learning gets done. I’ve moved from being “the sage on the stage” to “the guide on the side.”
I think there's room for both approaches, and that particular subjects are likely to have specific approaches that work best for them. Hard sciences, it seems to me, are ideal for the "guide to the side" approach. How that might translate into a history course, however, isn't entirely clear to me. I guess I'll have to give that some thought...
Subscribe to this blog's feed
