MulaiAzhagi wrote:http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education.html


After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies… are considered equivalent… if equal torques… will produce… equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge – nothing!

After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes – what do you do with them?”

“Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.”

“What will the exam be like?”

“Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, ” ‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ ” So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, “When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?”

“It comes out parallel to itself, sir – displaced.”

“And how much is it displaced?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I can figure it out.” So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.

After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, “Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?”

“No.”

Then I asked, “If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?”

“It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you’ve turned the book.”

I said, “You haven’t got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?”

“No, sir!”

He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how much it would be displaced, but he didn’t realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.

MulaiAzhagi wrote:

>>>A bit of a mixed bag for me. I did hve some, by no means all, teachers who wanted the answers that were in the book. In math, I actually had at least one middle school teacher who was excellent and encouraged curiosity and discussions and this was in a public school. On Feynman, he also talks about Greece where a young lady (maybe the host's daughter) tells him certain things have been deemed by the ancients and shouldn't be questioned. This wasn't in an academic context though, if I remember right. This was more along the lines of superstitious behavior. I was reminded of India when I read that.

Kris wrote:

MulaiAzhagi wrote:

>>>A bit of a mixed bag for me. I did hve some, by no means all, teachers who wanted the answers that were in the book. In math, I actually had at least one middle school teacher who was excellent and encouraged curiosity and discussions and this was in a public school. On Feynman, he also talks about Greece where a young lady (maybe the host's daughter) tells him certain things have been deemed by the ancients and shouldn't be questioned. This wasn't in an academic context though, if I remember right. This was more along the lines of superstitious behavior. I was reminded of India when I read that.

I was barely passing in my 7th grade and then came this science teacher, and the new cutish Felicita - the math teacher. They turned me around. Then came this guy who made history geography look so easy and interesting. That turned me around. At least, almost all of them were sincere and did their best to dumbos like me. I owe these people a lot of what I am today.

Oh... I met one of the teachers who was now a very old lady in the market. When I said "Samuel teacher...Vanakkam... she looked at me and said... I know you.. I know you... and try to remember my name...but could not... then she continued "you were the one who I brought to the teachers' room and made you stand on the bench for 2 full days"....daym... I did make a lasting impression on my teachers.

hm... and my relatives all thought I was this nice little boy.