(Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post…)<\/p>\n
Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing<\/a>:<\/p>\n As I’ve said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during ‘lecture’, and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving — and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don’t know.<\/p>\n I see this as directing the class’s and my energy at the biggest road-blocks to mastery. The traditional method of (i) presenting a lecture in class, (ii) asking students to respond to the lecture presentation with questions, and then (iii) go home to work on problems, seems to me to be quite inefficient.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I tend to come down more on the side of traditional lectures, myself– I teach the intro classes off PowerPoint (using the tablet PC to scribble in additional notes), but I’m definitely aware of the issues he raises (which are also the basis of the Just-In-Time Teaching<\/a> method). The stuff that I think students will find confusing is not necessarily the stuff that really ends up confusing them, and from year to year, they manage to be baffled by things that I think ought to be easy.<\/p>\n I end up doing primarily lecture for a few reasons, none of them particularly grounded in deep principle:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For one thing, it’s generally faster, particularly in the intro classes. We’re on a trimester schedule, and local politics demands that we try to cram something close to a semester’s worth of material into a ten-week term, and lecturing is just a faster way of going through that stuff. I’ve had good success with taking the occasional class off to just throw out a bunch of problems, and circulate while students work on them in groups, but it eats up time, which is at a premium.<\/p>\n “Just have them read the book,” you might say. Yeah, that’s a possibility, but the problem there is that I’ve never really run across a textbook that I’m happy with. They all have little quirks, some area where the explanation seems to me to be unnecessarily opaque. I think lecturing about those areas at least can be somewhat helpful, in that I can provide a different slant on the same material. And, of course, those who find my<\/strong> explanation needlessly opaque can always turn to the book for a different treatment…<\/p>\n Of course, there’s something to be said for learning how to learn from books– the tutorial classes at Williams<\/a> are certainly useful for that sort of thing. But then, there’s the issue of time, again.<\/p>\n Finally, there’s an issue of temperment. The “unstable” or “Just in Time” sort of approach is less suited to my personality. It’s not the flying-without-a-net thing– that aspect actually sounds kind of fun– but rather the fact that the sort of interactive class Arjendu desribes necessarily involves a lot of participation from students, and I’m terrible at dealing with students who won’t participate. The best tactic is pretty much to just wait them out– ask a question that demands a response, and then just stand there until they get uncomfortable enough that answering is better than just sitting there.<\/p>\n As anybody who has met me socially can attest, though, I’m horrible with awkward silences. I’m good for maybe five seconds, tops, before I start babbling just to fill the gap. I’m a little better in the classroom, but most students can outwait me.<\/p>\n So, while I’d like to use a little more unstable pedagody, I just haven’t been able to do it that much, or that consistently. It’s something I’ll probably keep struggling with, but that’s one of the things that makes the academic life interesting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post…) Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing: As I’ve said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and… Continue reading Stability and Pedagogy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n