The college’s physics department selected me as the outstanding physics student of the year. But when I say “physics department” I mean my physics instructor, when I say “selected me” I mean “flipped ten coins for each A student and picked whoever landed the most heads”, and when I say “outstanding” I mean “not much better, if at all, than the other students in the class”. But the ten coins flipped in my name have earned me a certificate (on real paper) and some “light refreshments” (meaning “tuna crackers and crappy punch”), so I’m not complaining.
I’m beginning to think my physics instructor is actually a really good teacher, and I don’t think that’s the award talking. He works through problems with us, makes mistakes with us, asks us to state and understand our assumptions (like “the field is static” or “the force of gravity doesn’t vary much this close to the earth”), and involves us a great deal in the teaching process. On Monday he even had me spend several minutes at the blackboard on my proof that a sphere’s volume is (4/3)πr3. We knew in advance that my proof was incorrect, but it was still a nice teaching moment.
My literature instructor, on the other hand, disappoints me on a fairly consistent basis. The syllabus for her class says students will be expected to “interpret the literature using critical thinking skills”. One very important part of critical thinking is scrutinizing a hypothesis (like “darkness is sinister in this story”) to see if it fits the evidence well. Basically, you look for ways to prove a hypothesis wrong, and the more tests it passes, the more reliable it is. It’s obvious that my physics teacher understands and employs critical thinking — you can’t get far in science without it — but my literature teacher apparently doesn’t. Yet she’s the one who mentioned it in her syllabus, and my physics instructor is so laid-back about everything that we didn’t even get a syllabus this semester.
Yesterday I observed a great example of uncritical thinking on her part. We’ve been reading Sigmund Freud’s “Dora”, which is in our literature anthology even though it’s much more psychoanalysis than literature. When the fact came up that Freud viewed most of the psyche in a sexual context, she said something like “but really, isn’t he right?” She went on to say that sex was the measure of biological fitness, and thus the thing the mind works toward, consciously or subconsciously. But she spent absolutely no time considering other possibly important motivations for behaviors of all kinds, such as healthy relationships with members of society. Of course, social considerations are not just of possible importance; they usually trump sexual urges in decision-making. I would have piped up if I had been given a minute to think, and if I had been more awake, but the kicker is that she didn’t appear to have thought through what she was saying. When you teach a class, it’s important to do things like that.
One more thing: she said that without Freud, “psychology would not exist”. Not “psychoanalysis would not exist”, not “psychology would be behind by thirty years”, but “would not exist“. I feel pretty bad for not calling her on that one, but her mistake slipped my notice until later, and though part of me really wants to write her an email, another part is almost sure it’d only lead to a bogus “refutation” along the lines of “that’s your opinion, and this is mine”. Can you tell I think she’s a bad teacher yet?
