Going Off Script
As the new year approaches, we’re excited to publish our course materials! There’s a lot that goes into the planning and orchestration, of course, and the hardest part of curating a lecture series is knowing what to cut.
The one benefit that in-person classes have - a benefit often ignored - is sporadic, tangential discussion. Whether this is in the moments before class begins, after the bell rings or a full-blown teaching strategy, going off script can be hugely impactful to students.
There are three modes in which this works.
First. It enables a depth of learning. Learning a nuanced, technical field like physics typically evolves like a spiral. You circle around a topic again and again, adding more details and context with each pass. Being able to zoom in on a specific topic exposes the student to the depth of knowledge that exists without overwhelming them. I remember a physics lab I taught as a graduate student. One of the students asked me offhand about chaining springs together. I showed the lab group how that can be used to model a string, how you can represent it with matrix equations and simplify the discussion, and probably landed somewhere between signal processing and quantum field theory. The take home point? Lots of stuff in equilibrium looks like springs.
Second. It can inspire a new avenue for investigation. Not all students actively ask questions, and those that do rarely know exactly what they’re trying to say. Of course, you can’t just go up to the professor and say “I’m confused about matrices” in a course on linear algebra. But the added context - the sheer level of new information - can sometimes lead to discoveries after class is over. As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to have the chair of the Math department teach my applied linear algebra course. I asked him a question about computing inverse matrices and he eventually launched into a quick discussion of group theory. I had no idea what he was talking about, but that diversion was the push that send me away from engineering and towards high energy physics.
Third. It’s feedback to the instructor. If student questions and interaction are constantly pulling you towards clarification - particularly in a single vein or of a particular idea - it’s a clear sign that you should invest more time in what you probably glossed over. The adage is something like “one question voiced represents ten”. Freshman engineering students coming to me mystified by the use symmetry to simply integrals - odd integrands over an even domain vanish, for example - helped me realize they were learning calculus and physics in real time, and I was able to explain myself better. Slowly. Hopefully they learned something they could use later.
Without a physical classroom, how can we go off script?
We’ll do office hours, sure. But the internet provides an unrivaled toolkit for teaching off-script. In between the detailed curation of a course and the free-for-all “pull” model that is Search lies “push”.
We’ll be pushing out a lightly curated stream of short bits of information relevant to those who study physics. Much of it will be technical. Much of it will be without context. Think of it as a constant stream of details and fun in theoretical physics that you can drink from, and really dive into if you find something you need or you’re excited about.
Where? If you follow us, you’ll find it. We’ll certainly stream it here.
