MeasurementBlog

Physicists are not gods, nor are they always right. I’ve learned that hard lesson many times over while both working for and learning from some noted and not-so noted physicists and trying to act god-like in my own encounters with geeks of any persuasion (I admit to being one, too).

Doctors of Medicine fall into the same category, yet that’s another story or three…later.

There’s a few experiences on physicist encounters of the first kind that I’d like to share.

First, I have to say, I have met many Physicists who were incredibly brilliant and also down-to-earth people. Same thing with Medical Doctors. But even exceptional people have feet of clay like my own, I think, at times.

Bottom line: we all can act like idiots sometime, again proving the Dilbert hypothesis that we all do, sooner of later. It’s truly a human condition.

Example No. 1 - While struggling as a Graduate Student trying to achieve a PhD in Physics (never did finish a thesis), I took a course in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) from an amazingly gifted, humble and friendly scientist who shall remain nameless. But it was an experience I still recall with clarity more than 40 years later; one of the very few classes that were memorable for me for meeting this professor and my class experiences.

QED was one of my last required courses in the Ph.D program in which I was enrolled. Without exception, none of the students earned anything less than an A in the course and few of us knew anything more about the subject when we completed it than when we began. We really got the biggest lesson in humility, though.

The course professor was so smart he was rumored to have shared an office at Princeton with Einstein. He could speak on any technical topic in Physics or Math, it seemed, for hours without notes or a reference. He was also very easily distracted.

You can probably guess what happened. After the first few classes when the material was clearly over our heads some of my fellow students began asking for details about peripheral matters, still on in a Physics or Math subject, but off the main syllabus of the course.

The professor was such a humble and obliging fellow, that he would take time to explain whatever was asked of him. With a few follow-on questions the class time would expire with little learned about QED on our part.

That tactic was employed by almost every student during the term. We even got to planning who would ask questions early on in the class and which ones were most likely would stretch out the time.

We learned a little about a lot of other things, but we learned the least about QED.

Near the end, we realized that we had behaved stupidly and would probably fail the final exam. It was an earth shattering thought that we would probably have to repeat the course. We were all scared silly as the Final Exam approached.

Surprise! The Final was a take home exam. It was open-ended, asking us to each write an essay on what we believed was the most significant item we had learned during the course, no problems, no equations just an invitation to produce BS.

I wrote on some Epistemology stuff I had learned in a Philosophy course as an undergrad; it almost filled the blue book. Other classmates were equally inventive and verbose.

We all passed with flying colors and nothing learned except the very hard lesson that we would need to try to pick up QED on our own, as time permitted.

Dilbert Lesson: We never really knew if the Professor understood what we were doing. Whether, he did or not, he was still only going through the motions of teaching, almost as much as we were going through a fiction of learning. (He was a pretty smart guy and probably gave us an out with meaningless top grades)

A bad combination for both sides.

I’ve come to understand that a true teacher’s responsibility is to ensure that his (or her) students is learning the subject and if not, then work to improve the interaction to ensure they do, if they but try. But teachers should ever pass students when they never demonstrated learning, let alone give them an A.

The major responsibility to ensure learning is the teacher’s, not the student’s.

In this case, both we, the students, and the Professor acted irrationally and thus failed in our responsibilities; he to us and we to ourselves.

We became concerned about grades rather than learning and he shirked his responsibility and either didn’t notice, as was his responsibility, or didn’t care.

Looks like Dilbert is nearly infallible!

---

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:17 am and is filed under Dilbert, Education, Organizations.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.