In the previous posts in this series, I described how using lessons I learned from Richard Feynman and John Preskill led me to become a more popular TA.

What I learned from a few others^*

If by some miracle I ever get to be a professor, there will be a few others I look to for teaching wisdom, some of which I’ve already made use of.

When it comes to writing problem sets, I would look to the two physicists who write the best problem sets I’ve ever seen: Kip Thorne and Andreas Ludwig. In my opinion, a problem set should not be something that just makes you apply the things you learned in class to other examples that are essentially the same as things you’ve seen before. The best problems make you work through an exciting new topic that the professor doesn’t have time to cover in lecture. I remember sitting in my office looking out at one of the 4 km long arms of the LIGO Hanford Observatory, where I was working during the summer after my sophomore year at Caltech, while working through some of Kip’s homework problems because those were some of the best resources I could find to teach me how the amazing contraption really works.¹ And Ludwig probably has the best problems of all. The first problem set from one of his classes on many-body field theory, a pretty typical one, consists of two problems written over five pages along with six pages of appendices attached. Those problems sets looked daunting, but they really weren’t. Once you read through everything and thought carefully about it, the problems weren’t so bad and you ended up deriving some really cool results!²

Finally, I’ll describe some things that I learned from Ed McCaffery who brilliantly dealt with the challenging job of teaching humanities at Caltech by accomplishing two goals. First, he “tricked” us into finding a “boring” subject interesting. Second, he had a great sense of who his audience was and taught us in a way that we would actually be receptive to once he had our attention. He accomplished the first goal by making his lectures extremely humorous and ridiculous, but in such a way that they were actually filled with content. He accomplished the second by boiling down the subject to a few key principles and essentially deriving the rest of the ideas from these while ignoring all of the technical details (it was almost as if we were in a physics or math class). The main reason I kept going to his classes was to be entertained—which is especially impressive seeing as how I would normally consider law to be a terribly boring subject—but I accidentally ended up learning a lot. Of all the hums I took at Caltech, his two classes are the ones I remember the most from to this day, and I know I’m not alone in this regard.

If I’m ever put in the challenging position of, for example, teaching an introductory physics course to students, maybe primarily premeds for illustrative purposes, who have no desire to learn it and are being forced to take it to satisfy some requirement, I would try to accomplish the same two goals that McCaffery did in what was essentially an equivalent scenario. It would be hard to be as funny as McCaffery, but maybe I could figure out some other way of being sufficiently ridiculous to “trick” the students into caring about the class. On the other hand, with a little experimentation and a willingness to ignore what I was told to do, I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to find a way to teach some physics in a way that these students could relate to and maybe actually remember something from after the class was over. In a bigger school like UCSB—where not everyone is going to be either a scientist, a mathematician, or an engineer and there are several segregated levels of introductory physics courses—I’ve often asked, “Why are we teaching premeds how to calculate the trajectory of a cannon ball, the moment of inertia of a disk, or the efficiency of a heat engine in quantitative detail?” It’s pretty clear that most of them aren’t going to care about any of this, and they’re really not going to need to know how to do any of that after they pass the class anyway. So is it really that shocking that they tend to go through the class with the attitude that they’re just going to do what it takes to get a good grade instead of with the attitude that they’d like to learn some science? I believe this is roughly equivalent to trying to teach Caltech undergrads the intricacies of the tax code, in the way you might teach USC law students, which I’m pretty sure wouldn’t be a huge success.

The first thing I would try would be to teach physics in a back-of-an-envelope kind of way, ignoring any rigor and just trying to get a feel for how powerful of a tool physics, and really science in general, can be by applying it to problems that I thought the students would be interested in or find amusing. For example, I might explain how using a simple scaling argument shows that the height that most animals can jump, regardless of their size, is roughly universal (and, by observations, happens to be on the order of half a meter). Or maybe I’d explain how some basic knowledge of material properties allows you to estimate how the maximum height of a mountain depends on the properties of a planet—and when you plug the numbers in for the earth, you basically get the height of Mt. Everest.³ You could probably even do this in such a way that every example and every problem would actually be relevant to what premeds might use later in their careers. And maybe the most important part is that I know I would learn a lot from doing this—it could even be completely different if taught multiple times—and so I would actually be excited about the material and would be motivated to explain it well.

Figure 4.1: Maybe the most famous back-of-an-envelope calculation of all time. Oops, we added a scale bar and a time stamp. With a little dimensional analysis and some physical intuition, anyone can now estimate how powerful our nuclear bomb is.

And if that didn’t work, I’d hope that in talking with the students and getting a sense of what was important to them, I would be able to come up with a different approach that would be successful. I simply don’t believe that it’s impossible to find a way to reach every kind of student, whether they be aspiring scientists, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, lawyers, historians, poets, artists, or politicians. Physics is just too exciting of a subject for that to be true, but you’ve got to know your audience. (Maybe McCaffery feels the same way about law and economics for all I know.)

Closing thoughts

There are two memories in particular of interactions with students that will always mean more to me than the teaching award itself because they remind me of how I felt interacting with John. After we were leaving a particularly good lunch lecture,⁴ I remember Steve grinning from ear to ear telling everyone within sight about how awesome the lecture was. In a similar situation after one of my quantum field theory lectures,⁵ I was standing in the hallway answering a student’s question, but out of the corner of my eye I could see a small group of students with similar grins as Steve’s and overheard them saying that these were some of the best recitation sections they had ever been to. The other time was when a student came to my office hours and asked if he could ask me a question about some random advanced physics topic he was reading about because he really wanted to understand it well and wanted to hear what I had to say about it. That student probably had no idea how good that made me feel because that’s exactly how I felt anytime I asked John a question.

Looking back over my notes for the field theory course, I feel like I didn’t actually do that good of a job overall, though I am happy that the students seemed to enjoy it and learned a lot from it. There are some things I am very proud of. Probably the biggest one was my last lecture on the Casimir effect which included a digression on what it means for something to be “renormalizable” or “non-renormalizable” and how there is absolutely nothing wrong with the second kind in the context of effective field theories.⁶ After an introduction to the philosophy of effective field theories (see footnote 6 for an excellent reference), that discussion mostly included the classic pictures, found in Figure 4.2, of the standard model superseding Fermi theory followed by string theory superseding the effective field theory of gravity,⁷ though I also very briefly mentioned that neutrino masses and proton decay could be understood by similar arguments.

Figure 4.2: The top three images are snapshots from my 5.5 page digression on renormalizability. The bottom image is an excerpt from notes that I frantically scribbled down after returning to my office at the IQI after John’s lecture on the same topic. The above-mentioned “regurgitation” should be clear.

But the lectures taken as a whole were too technical for the intended audience, unlike my phase transition lecture. At the time I was giving the lectures, I was working through Weinberg’s books on QFT (and GR) and was very excited about his non-standard approach which seemed especially elegant to me.⁸ I think I let my excitement about Weinberg creep into some of my lectures without properly toning down the math⁹ as is most clearly illustrated by my attempt to explain the spin-statistics theorem. That could be much better explained to the intended audience with pictures along the lines of Feynman’s discussion in Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics or John’s comments in his chapter on anyons.¹⁰ If I have the opportunity to teach ever again, I’ll try to do an even better John Preskill imitation, maybe perturbing it slightly with further wisdom gained from others over the years.

*This section lies somewhat out of the blog’s main line of development, and may be omitted in a first reading.