Tome of Wisdom

When I entered college, I chose to major in physics. I had heard about quantum mechanics and quantum computing, so I was excited to get more involved in these fields. I planned to get a B.S. in physics and then a masters in computer science. My first few years at UCLA, I made good progress towards this goal. But at some point, my physics education took a wrong turn.

I thought that my physics education would take me step-by-step through clearly-defined and logical steps, slowly allowing me to build my knowledge and understanding of the fundamental laws that underpin the universe. I thought that, once I graduated, I would have a firm grasp of most relevant physical laws and how they apply to any situation.

Boy, was I wrong.

Instead, I found myself constantly being dumped with too much work. The workload was always too much, too quickly. I never had enough time to sit down and figure things out logically in my own fashion. All I had time to do was find the relevant equations in the textbook and use them to solve the homework problems. As the complexity of the problems and their solutions increased, my ability to understand what the questions or their answers meant decreased. Eventually, my ability to comprehend the answer, or visualize what it meant in physical, observable reality, completely disappeared. Doing my physics homework became a meaningless mathematical exercise.

If I attempted to read the textbook to gain a deeper understanding, I would inevitably fall behind because of the impossible workload. Even if my valiant attempts to stay ahead of the workload were successful, the textbook often made no sense, did a poor job of defining its terms or referencing earlier proofs, or was just so deadly boring that I couldn’t possibly stay awake long enough to read more than a couple pages.

By the time I was advanced enough to take quantum physics my fourth year, I had almost completely given up hope. But here, at last, I was going to be able to study what I had entered the physics program to study: the Great, Mysterious, Quantum Mechanics. Sadly, this course ended up being one of my worst experiences. The textbook was so unreadable that it almost killed any interest I had for quantum mechanics. For the first time in my college career, I actually stopped reading the textbook. I only referenced the lecture notes. Also for the first time, I stopped trying to understand what my homework problems meant. I used every shortcut I could simply to complete the homework. The fact that I still got good grades in that year-long course tells you how little real understanding is actually required or valued in the physics major.

Every now and then I would learn something fascinating and exciting. Like the fact that an electromagnetic field is simply an electric field and a magnetic field, perpendicular to each other. How come nobody had bothered to mention this absurdly simple fact to me back in junior high school? I was perfectly capable of understanding it back then. I didn’t need to learn a bunch of complicated math, when a simple drawing would have conveyed the idea just as well. And what was the point of stuffing all these facts into my head, when I forgot 99% of it after the final?

I enjoyed my other academic pursuits far more. I had already been doing computer programming as a hobby for a long time, and I took a few courses to sharpen my skills and prepare for the computer science masters. I was fascinated with philosophy (probably due to my interest in religion and apologetics, which had led me into philosophical questions already). If I hated the physics major so much, and found 90% of it to be a waste of my time, why did I stick with it until the end? I’m still trying to figure out the answer to this question. Perhaps it was a mixture of pride, science fanboyism, and a desire to develop my intellectual facilities even if it meant tormenting myself. And to my university’s credit, my education did prepare me to engage myself in any academic enterprise I could desire. But I could have gained so much more from my education.

Some of my most interesting learning has occurred after I graduated from college and had lots of time to actually learn things that interested me. I’ve studied history, evolution, computer networks, and much more interesting arcana all on my own, in my spare time. Good research is done by brilliant people who are given time and freedom to explore whatever strange questions interest them. True, you have to do a lot of studying and learning before you can be given this kind of freedom, otherwise your curiosity leads you nowhere useful. But by forcing undergraduates to learn an overwhelming amount of subject matter, and depriving them of the big picture, you are just burning them out. They will just hate physics and never want to do it again.

If I were given the chance, how would I change how physics is taught?

First and foremost on my agenda is, teach less. Focus on improving the depth and quality of your teaching, rather than the quantity. Rather than overwhelming students with work and then watching them forget 99% of what you taught them, teach than half as much, give them time and guidance, and watch them remember everything.

Second, if your goal is to turn your physics undergraduates into graduate-level researchers, then for Pete’s sake expose them to research. Perhaps it was just in my case that I lacked any guidance whatsoever, but I honestly had no idea until my last few quarters what research was. Just from taking courses, you would think that science only consisted of learning equations. But this is backwards: science consists of exploring interesting questions, observing, questioning, and finally arriving at useful equations or models that encapsulate the observations. Instead of boring your students to death with meaningless equations, start with physical phenomena, get them questioning and wondering, and then expose to them, carefully and step-by-step, how to arrive at the equations that describe the phenomena.

Third, emphasize what everything means. Connect every single equation to its physical correlate. If some equations exist only to make other equations easier to solve, and have no connection to observable phenomena, then say so explicitly. Otherwise, everything is simply a mathematical game with no connection to reality. This is especially important because many students have misconceptions due to a substandard K-12 education. A good physics education ought to correct these misunderstandings. But if all you do is throw a bunch of incomprehensible mathematical equations at your students, without explaining what they mean, you do nothing to further your students’ understanding.

Fourth, keep students interested. I have had professors admit that the material they were going to teach is dreadfully, mind-bendingly boring. This is no excuse. Every tiny little bit of human knowledge arose because somebody, somewhere, was interested in something and was obsessed enough to come up with a contribution. The stories behind scientific discoveries are fascinating and interesting. If you can’t make your subject matter interesting, it is because you haven’t tried. And guess what? Your students won’t be interested, so they’ll just forget everything you taught them anyway.

Fifth, never let your students feel like they are stupid. Physics is one of the most difficult subjects, as well as mathematics. It took brilliant minds many centuries of confusion and bumbling and exploration before they finally stumbled upon the proper results. And yet students are expected to take hundreds of years of genius and absorb it in a couple weeks. It’s no wonder that physics students are constantly plagued by self-doubt, low self-esteem, and fear of failure. This is why most students don’t study science in the first place: they can’t handle the pressure.

Sixth, explain where the equations and concepts come from. If a professor simply tells the student the equation and its proof, the student is left wondering “How on earth did anyone ever think of that?” The equation just fell out of the sky, like God’s word being revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. The student will then think “Only a genius could ever think of this. I’m not a genius, so I could never think of this. I must not be cut out for physics.” But nothing could be further from the truth. Even smart people have to think very hard for a long time (months or years) and do things wrong many times before they even approach the right answer. Nothing ever just comes out of the blue. Ease your students’ fears, and let them know that anybody could come up with the same equations given enough time and training.

Seventh, focus less on grades and more on understanding and critical thinking skills. As my experience shows, any clever jackass can get away with a good grade while understanding nothing. Meanwhile, those who valiantly try to understand everything run out of time and get poor grades. If everything is being taught too quickly, pretty soon you cannot understand anything because you were never able to understand the first few weeks of the course. And once you start getting poor grades, you feel stupid and your motivation drops.

So teach less, explain more, keep it relevant and interesting, and you will end up doing a much better service for your students.

David Butler education, science