As I always say, if you can get students to internalize the problems, theyll care about the answers, actively learn them and integrate them, and retain what theyre learning. If you let the students interests drive the discussion, the material will come up as responses to their concerns and interests all by itself. This is the core of my philosophy of teaching. This experience from Randall Munroe sums it up: The students reacted as, well, typical students. “They seemed pretty bored,” Munroe recalled. “I could tell, because I remembered being that bored student.” Maybe, he joked, one of them had even begun doodling—his own preferred method for passing time when he was in school, and a habit that would later evolve into his popular online cartoon strip “xkcd.” Halfway through his lecture, Munroe decided to shift tactics. Veering away from the traditional classroom approach, he began illustrating concepts with zany examples. What if, for instance, the students had to sort out the energy dynamics of a scene in “Star Wars” or “The Lord of the Rings”? “Suddenly, the kids were excited and engaged,” he told me. “Before I knew it, they were running ahead of me, coming up with their own examples and solving their own equations.” At that moment, he realized that formulating exciting, relevant questions—questions that stemmed from students’ own concerns and interests, however far removed from a lecture hall—might sometimes be the best way to help people understand disciplines as complex as physics. However absurd and hypothetical, such questions seemed to engage students’ minds in a way that simple formulas alone did not.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:37:23 +0000
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