Female Science Professor talks about the frustrations associated with making sure your class has a decent room and all that fun stuff, especially when it’s a small interdisciplinary freshman seminar. The irony, of course, is that an off-the-beaten path course on a topic that the professor is really passionate about is much more likely to end up being the Best Class Ever for the enrolled students than any of the inevitable required courses, but they will always get the short end of the stick when it comes to scheduling and logistics.
But it got me thinking about the concept of the Best Class Ever. What is it that makes a college course especially memorable, years down the line? After at least fifteen seconds of quality rumination over my own experiences, two common features stand out. First, the professor was absolutely enthusiastic about the material; they weren’t just punching a clock, they were truly into it. Second, a very delicate balance was struck, in which the material was ultimately understandable (and interesting, it goes without saying), but also extremely challenging. The best classes were those in which you learned an incredible amount, but only after really sweating for it. Other than that, my favorite classes didn’t really have much in common; they were a remarkably heterogeneous group.
My favorite undergrad class, and also my favorite non-science class (among many strong contenders), was probably “Contemporary Political Images,” taught by philosopher-turned-social-theorist Jack Doody. We covered a lot of political and social theory — Marx, Rawls, Habermas, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, that kind of thing. It was a small seminar, and an indispensable ingredient of the class’s awesomeness was the talent and enthusiasm of the other students. Every week we were wrestling with Big Ideas about Virtue and The Good, and some of the best conversations were over breakfast in the dining hall before class. And years later, when Clarence Thomas mumbled something about Natural Law at his confirmation hearings, we all knew exactly what was going through his mind.
My favorite class in grad school, and also my favorite science class (without quite as many strong contenders) was probably Nick Warner’s general relativity course at MIT. I was a grad student at the liberal-arts college up the river, but Ted Pyne and I happily hopped on the Red Line twice a week to attend this course, given the sorry state of Harvard’s GR offerings at the time. This was a big lecture course, with detailed hand-written notes handed out beforehand, and there wasn’t too much in-class discussion — Nick talked awfully fast, and it’s not easy to stop that much momentum once it gets built up. (But there was a weekly recitation where we could ask whatever crazy questions popped into our heads.) Every week we were pushed to the limit, and loved it. We must have loved it, as Ted and I taught our own seminar to our fellow grad students the next year, and I went on to teach the course as a postdoc, and then as a professor, and write up my own notes, which eventually made it into a book. In the foreword of which, Nick gets a hearty acknowledgment.
So what were your best college classes ever? Feel free to provide supporting evidence and anecdotes, and reason inductively from there to a comprehensive theory of class awesomeness.
(I won’t reveal the best class ever from a teacher’s perspective — like children, they’re all my favorites.)
Oh it was definitely philosophy & quantum mechanics (with all the various interpretations of course) 😉
Sean, one offtopic request – I brought a few of your previous pieces here as quotes to another blog I frequently visit and to avoid misrepresenting your views, I’d like you to check it out 🙂
http://telicthoughts.com/what-dichotomy/#more-1731
Okay, back on-topic! 😉
Mine was an undergraduate medieval English course, where after each class the professor encouraged students with interest to join him on the long walk back to his office, where we could discuss things informally along the way. I learned so many more interesting things during those times, than in the class.
What stands out most was him saying, in relation to where the Church was the arbiter of knowledge in those days, how instead university professors were the modern day priests.
Mine was a 4th year undergrad physics course on “Information theory, neural networks and pattern recognition”. The lectures were interactive, and for once I actually felt like I was learning something. And it made a committed Bayesian out of me.
Without question the most valuable course I ever took was baby Rudin real analysis. There were other courses (modern English poetry, Chinese Communist revolution) with more epiphanies per minute, and much more drama, but if the main goal of a college course is to give a student the tools to learn more later, they didn’t come close. Ironically (insofar as I am putting substance above style, engagement, or “passion”) the instructor was Paul Sally, who is (deservedly, as far as my experience qualifies me to judge) regarded one of the leading teachers of mathematics in this era. Perhaps he has a large bag of subtle tricks and reverse psychology jujitsu, but my naive impression was simply that the course was 100% percent about substance and 0% about him.
Survey of British Romanticism with Larry Frank at the University of Washington in 1971. A lower-level survey course with 45 students wouldn’t seem like a good candidate for Best Course Ever, but Dr. Frank combined encyclopedic knowledge, manic energy, and deep enthusiasm in order to make this class the best I have ever taken. True, most of the discussion took place among the five people, including me, who sat in the first row & I’m not sure how the other 40 students got along; but this was a course that both challenged & excited me & gave me a sense of what kind of engagement effective critical reading & writing involved. Now that I am a professor of literature, I use that course as a benchmark for measuring my own success.
Richard Feynman’s “Physics X” also known as “Physics as a Performing Art.”
1 credit. No textbook. No homework. No notes. Just Feynman at the blackboard, asking “any interesting questions?” to undergrads, grads, postdocs, visitors, and then solving them in real time.
Dazzling. Tightrope walking without a net. Too bad that those were never filmed, as were his QED lectures.
I did used to drop in to the Food Science symposia at U.Mass,/Amherst, because they came with food. I remember the symposia on Beer, blearily, and the academically rigorous Seminar on Grits.
Then there’s the joke from “The Closing of the American Mind” that the MBA is not a real academic degree. The gist is that to offer an allegedly academic major with the justification that an MBA degree will earn the student more money, is as suspect as offering a degree in Sexology on the basis that the student will have more orgasms.
My favorite undergrad class for science/math was my first QM class. Great teacher who really enjoyed teaching, and was willing to challenge the students with the material. I think if you don’t enjoy QM, you shouldn’t be a physicist… It’s just too good. But for non-science related, I would go with a Medieval History course I took. I just love that era of history, so all the professor had to do was not suck, and I would have really enjoyed it.
Strangely enough, one of my most memorable college classes had nothing to do (at the time) with my major. I needed to take some humanities electives and I knew a geography professor because he was in our Amiga user’s group (yes, it was that long ago), so I signed up for his Latin American Geography class. Dr. Dawsey was enthusiastic about his material, having traveled extensively in South and Central America (including a drive from Texas to Brazil with a lot of awesome pictures and stories). As an added bonus, GIS was in its infancy at the time, but Dr. Dawsey had written a mapping program for the Amiga that really got me thinking about computer aided mapping tools. I’ve kept my knowledge and interest in the history and culture of the region (mainly though authors like Gabriel Garcia Marques and Jorge Luis Borges) and I eventually wound up doing GIS development. Coincidental to this article, I just e-mailed him recently and wrote about it on my blog.
Former Professors
“but they will always get the short end of the stick when it comes to scheduling and logistics.”
That doesn’t seem to be true at Stanford, we seem to give the Introductory Seminars a lot of extras (for example an extra bunch of money, one professor took the class to dinner during Finals week). Of course, I don’t have to deal with the registrar, so maybe it is hard for them to get rooms, but given the publicity we put on the program I rather doubt it.
And yes, the IntroSem “Basic Rules of Nature” is one of my better courses, even it was only a bit more technical than The Elegant Universe.
My most memorable class was a Philosophy course in logic, taught by Phil Hugly at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He was an outstanding scholar and teacher and the course was the most valuable course in my undergraduate program. I took it the second semester of my freshman year and learned two valuable lessons that I have carried with me through my life and my career as a mathematician: it was my first introduction to truly rigorous reasoning, and he instilled in me a passion for the truth.
The Late Robert Leighton taught a class very similar to the “Physics X” described by Jonathan above. Various topics of the students choice were discussed, and a independent study project was the deliverable. He had an uncanny understanding of Physics and an infectious enthusiasm for the topic.
Coming in second was an independent study project senior year at the University of Miami where I compared and contrasted the poetry of W. B. Yeats and William Blake with Jimi Hendrix. (hey it was 1974 ;))
e.
Three courses:
Seminar with E.W. Dijkstra (at U.T. Austin), for his ability to strip a proof down until every step is not only necessary, but unavoidable.
Topology with Alan Reid (at U.T. Austin), again for clarity, but also because of the way he would anthropomorphize mathematical objects in his lectures. When discussing correspondences between set elements, he would declare in his thick Scottish accent, “This little man in A grrrrrrroks this little man in B.”
Vector Calculus (at Rice, sadly I’ve forgotten the prof’s name, unless it was Dunne). At the time I wasn’t very good about waking up for classes, but I never missed his 8:00 class. I’m still not sure how I was supposed to integrate around the top of that broken wine bottle, though.
Complex Analysis taught by Robert C. Gunning. The mathematics was elegant, but Gunning’s enthusiasm and humor were priceless.
My favorite undergrad class would have to be my Honors Calculus Class(basically first year calculus but w/ physics related stuff added to it) taught by Prof. Lee Rudolph. He was as passionate about mathematics as one gets. Every class he filled 4 chalk boards with equations, as well as his chin and forehead from when he would step back and ponder where a missing term had gone. At then end of the semester we had a study party for the class final, and we invited him. He not only showed up, but also had a beer or two and showed us how to do the questions on the exam for the following morning.
I have to admit I did not get much joy out of my grad classes, since that time in my life was exceedingly stressful even for grad school standards. A fun class might have been Electro. & Mag. Dynamics, but that is mostly due to weekend homework sessions with classmates that I enjoyed. For a while we meet at Borders and did the homework together in the cafe. You get a lot of interesting looks from the people in store when a small group of people are arguing over canceling terms and charge distributions. Eventually we just worked on a table in the lab, since we disturbed fewer people that way.
Undergrad: the several week section on Dante of a Great Books class that was guest taught by Ralph Williams at Michigan. He had all the requisite crazy enthusiam & passion to make me get up and go to an across-campus class at 8am.
Grad: Sean’s cosmology class, especially since I took it later on in grad school so I already knew some stuff but it filled in a bunch of holes… and with the right amount of work to make you actually work but not so much to hate it. (And of course, the enthusiasm goes without saying here).
String theory for undergraduates, with Barton Zwiebach and Jeffrey Goldstone; statistical physics for graduates, with Mehran Kardar; environmental politics and policy, with the late and much lamented Stephen Meyer.
“International ideas and institutions” with Charles Hill at Yale. At the time, this was his pet class, for third-year international studies concentrators, but for anyone if you just asked (a secret, though, to keep the class small). At the beginning of each lecture was a q&a section where we asked him stuff about the news and he gave his take, often beginning with, “I called [top republican administration contact x] to ask him about this yesterday, and he said…”. The answer usually involved some theme and/or reading we had discussed in class, and it always came up in a natural way–not contrived at all. As more and more questions got satisfying answers this way, it just became obvious that the best way to understand the world was with constant reference to history and in particular the history of ideas. Our readings consisted of snippets from all the important authors in moral, legal, and political theory, organized in to weekly themes like sovereignty, balance of power, diplomacy, revolution, etc.. Hill identified the beginning of the modern world with the peace of Westfalia in 1648, with the establishment of the modern system of statehood in light of Hugo Grotius’ (1625) notions of sovereignty and his just war theory (analyzing when war is, and is not, moral). One of the central issues here is in what cases a preemptive war is justified. Bingo! Bush had just invaded Iraq (preemptively), and it was really fun (and enlightening) to employ Grotius’ framework in discussing this.
Assignments for this class were short (1 or at most 2 page essays). Hill always said that when you go in to the real world (i.e., government) you have to keep things to one page or your superior won’t read them. But, you also have to stay grounded in the big ideas in order to have done the right analysis. So, you have to do an academic analysis, but keep it short and snappy (and unpretentious). That was a great exercise and the topics were fun. Sometimes he took newspaper articles and asked us to both summarize and analyze them in a page. I remember in particular when the united states intercepted a shipment of missiles to Yemen. What should our response be? Sometimes he made up news events, like in the following assignment, which appeared on an in-class midterm.
This morning, Quebec announced that it was succeeding from the Canada. The Canadian government has responded that it does not recognize this succession. You are asked to prepare an immediate response from the UN. Do so in three sentences, drawing on themes from the class.
Hill also had some ideas some found crazy. For example, he blamed the failure of the CIA in the last few years on a kind of “affirmative action for states” they now employ in recruiting. In the past, the CIA got most of its agents/analysts from Yale (and a few other schools, but mostly Yale). Thus, everybody involved had the kind of education he was now giving you (he said). Nowadays, the CIA has to get some people from all states, to make the senators happy (he said), and the people recruited just don’t have the kind of grounding in international ideas and institutions that they should. I thought this was a little silly back then, but thinking back on it, maybe he is right. At least, through my nostalgia-tinted goggles, it seems so.
What a great class 🙂
Of course, it was a close call with “Introduction to Cosmology” from Sean Carroll!
🙂
Two-way communication. I’ve always preferred those classes where the prof wasn’t just doing his thing, but made an effort to get in touch with the students.
One can overdo enthusiasm. I’ve known a prof who was so enthusiastic he couldn’t stick with one topic, but always jumped ahead because it’s so great there is a connection to … and we find this also in… and … He was very popular with the students but they hardly learned anything.
Not sure it was my favorite, but one of the more unusual undergraduate classes I took was Yakir Aharonov’s “Famous Paradoxes in Physics”. I could swear he never prepared class, every session started with a long silence while he tried to come up with something to talk about. He always succeeded brilliantly…the format of the class was simple- he presented the paradox, then we had to try to come up with solutions. Lots of fun.
Believe it or not, I was not fishing for people to mention my own classes. But thanks!
At Princeton: Dan Marlow’s undergraduate classical mechanics class, and Paul Steinhardt’s graduate cosmology class.
At MIT: Bob Jaffe’s graduate QM sequence.
Probably the best course ever would be a calculus series taught by a lecturer who, besides being an accomplished mathematician, was also an excellent artist and could rapidly sketch all manner of differential forms, vector projections and the like. (His name was Richard Mitchell). I was so struck that I took every course he offered, and as a result was introduced to the notion of differential forms in electromagnetic theory, something I otherwise would never have learned about.
Note to college students: When you find a really good teacher in your undergraduate career, it’s not a bad idea to take every class that teacher offers! It’s not to surprising to find that the best courses are often taught by lecturers, who don’t have to juggle research, advising graduate students, and teaching undergraduate courses (although a few exceptional individuals manage to do that quite well).
University administrators would do well to acknowledge the important role that lecturers play.
I second the motion that, if you find a really good professor, you should take as many of their classes as you can. You’ll often learn more than by sticking more conventionally with the courses you are “supposed” to take.
My best physics class would have to be graduate Quantum Mechanics with Hitoshi Murayama. The lectures were always exciting and somewhat interactive (he was clearly very enthusiastic about the material) and the homework problems were always interesting and relevant to actual physical questions. Also, use of Mathematica or other computer tools was encouraged and at times required, which really helped me to learn a tool which has become indispensable in research. The course website is actually still online here and here.