Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: Eternal Student on 13/03/2024 01:40:41
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Hi.
Recall the first year at University, college or whatever it was called that you may have gone to? The lectures seemed great.
In the later year(s), the lectures did not seem as good. Why?
Is it these things:
(i) Many of the well established staff have become involved in the first year lectures. They were often presented by lecturers that had been running the course for years and had a lot of good material, maybe practical demos, video clips etc. ready and good to go.
By comparison, in the later years, the course may only run every other year instead of every year and the lecturers assigned may not be the most experienced staff. While they were certainly competent and sufficiently experienced in the area, they just would have had some teaching time left to allocate while other staff may not. As mentioned, many of the professors were already allocated to the compulsory courses with the really big numbers of students and, I suspect, did genuinely enjoy introducing the topic(s) to the new students and running those courses.
(ii) The beginning of everything just always will seem more interesting. There are so many directions to go off in and you will see many snippets of more specialised things that are genuinely interesting and seem attractive.
By comparison, when you're actually doing the specialised courses, you find that although there are some genuinely interesting and elegant bits, a lot of it isn't so elegant. The whole area may still be quite near the frontier of knowledge and the technqiues will be much more practical, based on numerical approximations, computer simulations or basically "clumsy", messy and inelegant. It will take some years before some of it is refined into something more elegant and the bits that may have been going in the wrong direction are discarded. By which time, of course, this version will have found its way into the courses in the earlier years - so the stuff in the specialised courses will always tend to be the less refined and raw stuff.
---- Anyway, I don't know... maybe it's something else. I'm now watching a few lectures online and I've noticed the same trend again: The later years lectures are just not as good or as well polished. Is this just how it is all the time and everywhere?
Best Wishes.
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Not the sort of sentiment one expects to find in a science forum - it's the unknown and unexpected that pays the rent!
The first two years were mostly about learning to use the tools of the trade, which were pretty well polished and indeed "elegant" by the time they were handed to us. But the third year was all about applying them to real-world problems of steadily increasing incompleteness in the hope that we might go on to increase humanity's store of knowledge, save lives, or make a profit, in a world full of failures and uncertainties.
There are few tools more elegant than a Japanese saw, but its purpose is to turn rough timber into a house, so at some point the apprentice carpenter has to be introduced to a real tree, and no two are alike.
In a parallel life, I remember a very polished introductory lecture on Bernouilli's theorem, which, once we had mastered the art of getting off the ground in fair weather (ask any bird), gradually morphed into the least worst procedure for ditching in darkness (very few survivors to date).
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Yes, firstly they are far more broad so the interesting bits are far more frequent, secondly its all new to you. In engineering when the propper formula start to show themselves it is akin to being an accountant.
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A Teacher, the likes of which, i could Never have.
(& i never will)
Copyrights/Credits/Source -
Prof. Walter Lewin/For the Allure of Physics/YouTube.
*Note -
This video was formerly hosted on the Youtube channel MIT OpenCourseWare.
Due to a Serious complaint against Dr. Lewin, MIT has Revoked his title of Professor Emeritus as of Dec 2014.