Telescope Reviews: Boring Science Teachers

Articulate, thought-provoking lectures *are* a valuable form of teaching. For example, a great many people find the TED series of lectures to be extremely worthwhile in expanding their awareness and knowledge of things they would otherwise not have been exposed to. For lectures to be effective teaching, however, they have to successfully engage most of the audience into actively thinking through the material presented, rather than simply passively collecting fact-tokens to be stored away in a notebook for a future test.

This is not to dismiss the value of teachers who are good at didactic methods of teaching, nor the value of teachers who are good at choosing and assisting with exercises designed for self-teaching by students through experiment and experience. However, teaching in this manner effectively and engagingly is as difficult as teaching through engaging lecturing. Too often, the "experiment and experience" winds up being little more than students plodding through workbooks, or laboriously plodding through dull "experiments" that teach students little except bureaucratic hoop-jumping to get the necessary token of academic credit to move on. The didactic (or Socratic) method is, in the hands of far too many teachers, simply a clumsy, awkward, dull technique to attempt (or simulate) engaged teaching or learning, used with poor sensibility about what sorts of back-and-forth dialogue with students is useful or engagingly interesting. In too many hands, it becomes little more than a mutually embarassing pop quiz about material the student has little sense or desire regarding its potential importance, except to give enough of an answer to get the teacher off their back for the moment. zzzzzz.

I'd VASTLY prefer to have Dr. Feynemann as my "teacher", even in a large lecture hall format, than the vast majority of teachers I've endured who try to employ "techniques" their college education departments considered "teaching", when simply being a good, truthfully accurate storyteller about whetever subject they're teaching, able to infectiously convey their own fascination with the subject-matter...is infinitely more valuable. The best teachers I've ever had are NOT that way because of anything they learned through educational pedagoguary, but rather because they are articulate evangalists of some subject they have strong native interest in themselves.