Teaching Philosophy

Several of my ideas concerning education and learning.

Adapted from M. P. Silverman, Waves and Grains: Reflections on Light and Learning (Princeton 1998)

Chapter 15: "A Heretical Experiment in Teaching Physics"

Although it is not futile to attempt to communicate the importance of great ideas to students at colleges and universities, there is nevertheless much truth in Feynman's emphasis on the need to reach children. I know this first hand, because I have taught children---my own---from elementary school through high school. Together with my wife, we covered the full range of required academic subjects---and then some. This was not a "hit or miss" activity, but a serious responsibility that I carried out with daily regularity simultaneously with college/university teaching and pursuing a career as a research scientist. It would be an understatement to say that the experience was challenging and required unwavering dedication. Certainly no other research scientist I know personally has ever cared to follow my example. Public schools are in no danger of emptying because of people like me!

It was from teaching my own children, however, that I learned what learning was all about and what a good teacher could do to foster it. I learned that healthy young children (brought up without a television in the house) are never at a loss for activity; they are always learning---and, because they value their own time highly, they resent and resist being bored. I learned that the most important lesson to teach was that learning is a lifelong activity; it did not end with the end of a term or a textbook. I learned that it was far more important to show my children how to find information and use it, than to require them to memorise it; and I saw that the information they actually needed was more often than not committed to memory anyway. My children taught me that evidence of learning was not to be found in tests and paper exercises of no interest to anyone outside a classroom, but in practical applications to the world around them, in the actions and attitudes of their daily lives, and in their character and creativity. They showed me that thinking---and therefore learning---more readily occurred in stretches of unhurried leisure than in desperate adherence to schedule, and that the purpose of education was not to cover material hastily, but to 'uncover' it deliberately so that one could reveal and appreciate its significance. And they impressed upon me the critical distinction between schooling and education.

I have taught my children for many years---and they have taught me. And I wondered: Why can't students in colleges and universities learn in the same way?

Science, especially physics, is difficult enough without the added burden of being perceived as boring or irrelevant. It becomes relevant---and consequently interesting---when it addresses questions arising out of a learner's own curiosity. How does a teacher tap that curiosity and elicit each student's natural inclination to learn? I have created an educational framework that I believe accomplishes this; I call it self-directed learning. The nature of my "heretical experiments" in teaching is discussed in publications listed at this site.

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