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.

In the first post of this series, I described some frustrations I had with what we were told to do in TA training. In the previous post, I recalled some memories of interactions I had with John Preskill while I was working at the IQI.

When it came time for me to give my last electrodynamics lecture, I remember thinking that I wanted to give a lecture that would inspire my students to go read more and which would serve as a good introduction to do just that—just as John’s lectures had done for me so many times. Now I am not nearly as quick as John,¹ so I didn’t prepare my lecture in my head on the short walk from my office to the classroom where I taught, but I did prepare a lecture that I hoped would satisfy the above criteria. I thought that the way magnets actually work was left as a bit of a mystery in the standard course on electrodynamics. After toying around with a few magnet themes, I eventually prepared a lecture on the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transition from a Landau-Ginzburg effective field theory point of view.² The lecture had a strong theme about the importance and role of spontaneous symmetry breaking throughout physics, using magnets and magnons mainly as an example of the more general phenomenon. Since there was a lot of excitement about the discovery of the Higgs boson just a few months earlier, I also briefly hinted at the connection between Landau-Ginzburg and the Higgs. Keeping John’s excellent example in mind, my lecture consisted almost entirely of pictures with maybe an equation or two here and there.

This turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I taught identical recitation sections three times a week, and the section attendance dropped rapidly, probably to around 5–10 students per section, after the first few weeks of the quarter. Things were no different for my last lectures earlier in the week. But on the final day, presumably after news of what I was doing had time to spread and the students realized I was not just reviewing for the final, the classroom was packed. There were far more students than I had ever seen before, even on the first day of class. I remember saying something like, “Now your final is next week and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have on any of the material we have covered. Or if no one has any questions, I have prepared a lecture on the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transition. So, does anyone have any questions?” The response was swift and decisive. One of the students sitting in the front row eagerly and immediately blurted out, “No, do that!”

So I proceeded to give my lecture, which seemed to go very well. The highlight of the lecture—at least for me because it is an example where a single physical idea explains a variety of physical phenomena occurring over a very large range of scales and because it demonstrated that at least some of the students had understood most of what I had already said—was when I had the class help me fill in and discuss Table 3.1. Many of the students were asking good questions throughout the lecture, several stayed after class to ask me more questions, and some came to my office hours after the break to ask even more questions—clearly after doing some reading on their own!

Table 3.1: Adapted from Table 6.1 of Magnetism in Condensed Matter. I added the last row and the last column myself before lecture. The first row was discussed heavily in lecture, the class helped me fill in the next two, and I briefly said some words about the last three. T_c is the critical temperature at which the phase transition occurs, M is the magnetization, P is the polarization, ρ_G is the Fourier component of charge density at reciprocal lattice vector G (as could be measured by Bragg diffraction), ψ and Δ are the condensate wavefunctions in a superfluid or superconductor respectively, φ is the Higgs field, BB = “Big Bang”, EW = “Electroweak”, and GUT = “Grand Unified Theory” (the only speculative entry on the list). The last two signify the phase transitions between the grand unified, electroweak, and quark epochs. Thanks to Alex Rasmussen and Dominic Else for heated arguments about the condensed matter rows that helped to clarify my understanding of them. To pre-empt Dominic yelling at me about Elitzur’s theorem, here is a very nice explanation by Francois Englert explaining, among other things, why gauge symmetries cannot technically be spontaneously broken. (This seems to be a question of semantics intimately related to how some people would say that gauge symmetries are not really symmetries—they’re redundancies. Regardless of what words you want to use, Englert’s paper makes it very clear what is physically happening.)

After that experience, I decided to completely ignore everything I was taught in TA training and to instead always try to do my best John Preskill imitation anytime I interacted with students. (Minus the voice, of course. There’s no replicating that, and even if I tried, hardly anyone would get the joke.) As I suggested earlier, a big frustration with what I was told to do was that—since UCSB has so many students with such a wide range of abilities—I should mostly aim my instruction for the middle of the bell curve, but could try to do some extra things to challenge the students on one tail and some remedial things to help the students on the other—but only if I felt like it. I’ve been told there’s no reason to “waste time” explaining how an idea fits into the bigger picture and is related to other physical concepts. Most students aren’t going to care and I could spend that time going over another explicit example showing the students exactly how to do something. I thought this was stupid advice and did it anyway, and in my experience, explaining the wider context was usually pretty helpful even to the students struggling the most.³

But when I started trying to imitate John by completely ignoring what I was supposed to do and instead just trying to explain exciting physics like he did, I seemed to become a fairly popular TA. I think most students appreciated being treated as naive equals who had the ability to learn awesome things—just as I was treated at the IQI. Instead of the null hypothesis being that your students are stupid and you need to coddle them otherwise they will be completely lost, make the null hypothesis that your students are actually pretty bright and are both interested in and able to learn exciting things, even if that means using a few concepts from other courses. But also be very willing to quickly and momentarily reject the null in a non-condescending manner. I concede the point that there are many arguments against my philosophy and that the anecdotal data to support my approach is potentially extremely biased,⁴ but I still think that it’s probably best to err on the side of allowing teachers to teach in the way that excites them the most since this will probably motivate the students to learn just by osmosis—in theory at least.

The last class I was a TA for (an advanced undergraduate elective on relativistic quantum mechanics) was probably the one that benefited the most from my attempts to imitate John, and me regurgitating things that I learned from him and a few others (see Figure 4.2 in the last post). The course used Dirac and Bjorken and Drell as textbooks, which are not the books that I would have chosen for the intended audience: advanced undergrads who might want to take QFT in the future.⁵ By that time, I was fully into ignoring what I was supposed to do and was just going to try to teach my students some interesting physics. So there was no way I was going to spend recitation sections going over, in quantitative detail, the Dirac Sea and other such outdated topics that Julian Schwinger would describe as “best regarded as a historical curiosity, and forgotten.”⁶ Instead, I decided right from the beginning, that I would give a series of lectures on an introduction to quantum field theory by giving my best guess as to the lectures John would have given if Steve or I had asked him questions such as “Why are spin and statistics related?,” or “Why are neutral conducting plates attracted to each other in vacuum?” Those lectures were often pretty crowded, one time so much so that I literally tripped over the outstretched legs of one of the students who was sitting on the ground in the front of the classroom as I was trying to work at the boards; all of the seats were taken and several people were already standing in the back. (In all honesty, that classroom was terrible and tiny.⁷ Nevertheless, at least for that one lecture, I would be surprised to learn that everyone in attendance was enrolled in the course.)

In the last post, I’ll describe some other teaching wisdom I learned from a few other good professors as well as concluding with some things I wish I had done better.

In the previous post in this series, I described some teaching skills that I subconsciously absorbed by reading works by Feynman. I also described some frustrations I had with what we were told to do in TA training.

What I learned from Preskill

Luckily for me, and hopefully for my students, the instructor for the first class I was a TA for (the upper division classical electrodynamics course) eventually gave me the freedom to really do things how I would want to, which, when I saw the results, led me to really ignore everything I was told. During the last week of the course, he said I could do whatever I wanted in the recitation sections since he was going to do review and talk about some advanced topics in lecture. It’s hard to know how all my experiences with good (and bad) teachers subconsciously influenced my teaching style, but the first time I remember consciously thinking about what kind of a teacher I wanted to be was the night before my first recitation section of the week, while I was planning my last lecture of the course. I distinctly remember reflecting on the following memories from my time at the IQI while trying to decide what to talk about and how to say it.

Once a week, John would run a two part group meeting. The first part consisted of everyone going around the room briefly summarizing what they had worked on for the past week, while the second consisted of a more traditional lecture about a specific topic of the speaker’s choice. At one point, one of the postdocs was in the middle of giving a series of lectures on a very technical subject. I was always struggling to follow them and stay interested and engaged in the discussion. I remember almost nothing from this particular series of lectures other than that the postdoc seemed to be trying to teach us every single detail about the subject rather than trying to give us a general feeling for what it was about. I’m sure it wasn’t so bad for the more advanced physicists in the room, and I bet I would get more out of them if I heard them again today.

But then one marvelous week, John decided he was going to give the lecture instead. He started off by saying something along the lines of, “We have heard some very technical talks recently, which is good, and I have learned a lot from them. But sometimes it’s also good just to look at pictures.” He proceeded to give an extremely interesting, coherent, and inspiring lecture on black hole complementarity. I don’t think he ever wrote down a single equation, but I remember most of what he talked about and the pictures he drew to this day. I was honestly sad¹ when the hour was up and was extremely excited to learn more. As soon as I got home that night, I read many papers on the subject of black holes and information, some of them John’s of course,² for several hours and couldn’t have managed to get more than three hours of sleep.

This was not a unique experience with John’s masterful teaching technique. The summer I spent working at the IQI was one of the happiest times of my life since I got to spend so much time with so many scientists who I wasn’t even working with, including John. The project that I was supposed to be working on at the IQI was supervised by (then postdoc) Alexey Gorshkov and dealt with two-dimensional spin systems and efforts to simulate them experimentally. Although I greatly enjoyed working on that project, which actually went pretty well and led to my first paper, by far my favorite part of working at the IQI was getting to eat lunch with John and the rest of the group, in particular (then postdoc) Steve Flammia.

Most days as we would walk back to the IQI from the cafeteria, Steve would ask John some question, usually about quantum field theory or cosmology. (For example, “Why do some classical symmetries not survive quantization?”) By the time we got back to the lounge, John would have prepared the perfect lecture to answer Steve’s question, enlightening both to the most accomplished postdoc and the most naive undergrad. These lectures were amazing. I wish we had taped them so that I could watch them again. John did not shy away from equations when they were called for in these lectures, but they were still filled with pictures. (See Steve’s recollections of these lectures here and John’s here. The closest recorded lectures to John’s lunch lectures that I am aware of are some of Lenny Susskind’s more advanced courses from The Theoretical Minimum.³ The main difference between the two styles is that, due to the large discrepancy between the two audiences, John would compress something Susskind might explain into maybe a third to a quarter of the time Susskind would take. On occasion, John might use some slightly more sophisticated technology or go into a little more detail as well, but the essential style is very similar.)

I think John knew that I loved these lectures, but what he and Alexey might not know is that they were extremely detrimental to my productivity on the project that “I was supposed to be working on,” though I don’t think John would see it that way. After each of these lectures, I was forced to spend at least an hour reading textbooks or journal articles going into more detail on the topics John had just so masterfully discussed. Since I shared an office with Alexey, I often tried to hide what I was actually doing before getting back to work; I don’t think Alexey would have cared, but I wasn’t taking any chances. When I say “I was forced,” I literally mean that listening to John put me in a state of mind where I felt I had no choice but to read more. (Maybe John’s distinctive bedtime story voice makes him a kind of “snake charmer” of physicists by hypnotizing us into reading more physics.) Since John’s lectures always cut straight to the heart of any subject, this was the perfect way to learn something new or to clarify something found confusing before. Armed with a Preskill lecture and all the nice pictures fresh in my mind, it always seemed so easy to just start reading a technical account of something that I would certainly have found difficult without John’s introduction to it.

Figure 2.1: John Preskill, a “snake charmer” of physicists. Artwork by my uncle Eric Wayne.

Eventually, I was allowed to ask John the question on occasion, and sometimes Steve and I would discuss what we should ask John on the way back before we left for lunch. Of course, this great responsibility only caused me to read even more about things that “I was not supposed to be working on” so that we would have a better chance of having a real gem. (Occasionally, I was devastated to learn that Steve had already asked John some question that I had thought of like, “Why is CP violated?” I really wanted to hear that lecture, but Steve had already asked it, and there were no repeats.)

At the time, Steve claimed that his upcoming research appointment at the University of Washington required him to increase his knowledge of physics outside of quantum information and that asking John these questions was the perfect way to do that. This is partially accurate, though the truth is that Steve actually “knew” the answers, in a technical sense, to most of the questions he asked John; what was really important was to get an intuitive picture that could easily be lost when hearing or reading a very in-depth technical account of something. He wanted to “hear the story from a master” and in the process learn both some awesome physics and John’s “style,” i.e. to be able to give a deep, simple, and well organized argument on a wide range of subjects at a moments notice.⁴ In this sense, it almost didn’t matter what subject John actually lectured on, and I think this was the main reason for the somewhat vague “Why?” format in which most of these questions were phrased. Luckily for me, and my future students, I was able to get a good enough look at John’s “style” as well that I would be able to make an (imperfect) imitation when I became a TA about a year later.

In the next post, I’ll describe how, by trying to imitate John, I seemed to become a fairly popular TA.

Editor’s Note: Kevin Kuns, a physics concentrator in the Caltech Class of 2012, received the D. S. Kothari Prize in Physics for undergraduate research conducted at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information.  Now a graduate student at University of California at Santa Barbara, Kevin won an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award there. Bursting with pride upon hearing from Kevin that his IQI experiences had contributed to his teaching success, we urged Kevin to tell his story. This took some arm twisting because of Kevin’s inherent modesty, especially when it became clear that Kevin had more to say than could comfortably fit into one blog post. But we persevered, and we’re glad we did! We hope you enjoy Kevin’s series of four posts, starting with this one.

This is the story of how—by ignoring what I was told to do and instead trying to reproduce the conditions that made me so excited about physics by trying to imitate key aspects of the people who inspired me—I won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the UCSB physics department at the end of my first year there as a grad student.¹ Many of the things that inspired me to become a good teacher occurred while working at the IQI as an undergrad at Caltech, which I guess is what qualifies me to write this series of posts. Since my advice is to ignore what people tell you and to do what works for you, you should also ignore everything I say—except for the parts that work for you. While I’m certainly not a master, I hope the extensive scientific references, mainly found in the footnotes (especially in the later posts) and easily skipped by the laymen, will provide the more technically inclined readers of all levels with the resources to learn some exciting physics from the real masters.

Figure 1.1: The only baseball cap I own. There was no “and Matter” when I was there, but I remember a lot of excitement about the upcoming addition of the “M” when John announced it at the very end of my time there.

I’ll start by recounting some of the things that excited me about physics to such a degree that I was then forced to spend a considerable amount of time learning more on my own. Then I’ll move on to how I learned from them as a TA.

While there are many people who have influenced my teaching style, the two biggest influences are Richard Feynman and John Preskill. Though I never got to know Feynman, I had the extreme good fortune of actually getting to talk with John somewhat frequently. I think I used the lessons I learned from Feynman, probably mostly absorbed subconsciously, effectively in my teaching, both in lecture and one-on-one with students in office hours, to become a competent TA. But I think I became a good TA when I decided to try to imitate John.

Since Feynman came first, I’ll start with him.

What I learned from Feynman

I’ve been interested in science for as long as I can remember, but I became laser focussed on physics when my parents bought me some of the audio to The Feynman Lectures on Physics for Christmas when I was in ninth grade. I couldn’t understand much of it at the time, especially without the pictures or equations to go along with the audio, but after (I think three times) listening to the lecture on the double slit experiment, I was able to piece together what was going on. I thought I must have misunderstood—maybe I guessed the geometry of the slits, the screen, and the electron gun incorrectly?—and listened to it several more times to figure out where I went wrong. But I hadn’t misunderstood: that’s how the world really works!²

Figure 1.2: The best Christmas present I ever had: 12 of Feynman’s lectures on quantum mechanics. In hindsight, a more appropriate gift for a complete novice who’s never taken a physics class in his life would be the version of Six Easy Pieces that comes with the audio and which includes the double slit experiment as the last chapter.

I had to know more and had absolutely no patience in doing so. Within a year, and before having ever taken a physics class, I read QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter,³ then The Character of Physical Law,⁴ then Six Easy Pieces, then Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, then I got the full three volume set. I picked up the necessary math along the way and started branching away from only reading things that Feynman wrote⁵ and eventually read many of the classic textbooks you would use in an undergrad course on physics. But since Feynman was the initial source of my excitement about physics, I also read much of his non-technical stuff and learned a lot of lessons from that as well.

I think the most important non-technical lesson I learned was the importance of being able to explain things simply and clearly, but without lying or changing the essence of the phenomenon in anyway. Probably inspired by a line from Cargo Cult Science, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool,” I have, beginning in high school, developed an internal check system to ensure that I really understand new things and am not fooling myself. Right now it works like this (I’m sure Feynman said similar things that caused me to do this, but I don’t remember where at the moment): First, I think about how I would explain something to one of my colleagues—a fellow grad student. Then I think about how I would explain it to an undergrad, then to a high school student studying physics, then to my parents or my little sister. The further down I get, the better I understand something; but if I can’t get all the way down, then I don’t really understand it. There are not many things that I really understand, but there are a few.

Going into teaching with this attitude was probably pretty helpful. In my opinion, learning from your students is one of the funnest parts of teaching. There are usually many ways to understand a concept and apply it to certain problems, and sometimes there’s “an obviously easier” approach or way of thinking that is useful in certain circumstances. But to get to the point where you’re “qualified” to be a teacher, you only had to understand things in whatever way worked for you. To be a competent teacher, on the other hand, requires you to understand every way one of your students could possibly understand it so that you can explain things in whatever way is best for each individual student. Maybe if a student doesn’t understand something, it’s really your fault for not explaining it well or for never really giving them the chance in the first place. If they can’t understand something, maybe that means that you don’t really understand it as well as you thought you did—and then you get to learn something too! In this vein, I think student mistakes can also be really fun ways for even you to understand things better because it forces you to really understand why they were wrong, which can sometimes be rather subtle. I would not be surprised if I learned more from my students’ mistakes and misconceptions than they learned from me.⁶

The most frustrating part of TA training for me was the implicit, and sometimes explicit, message that your students are idiots who need to have their hands held through everything. I’ve been guilty of ridiculing some particularly ignorant mistakes in private myself, but, at least for me, the real frustration was that the system allowed these mistakes to propagate so far and not with the students themselves—many of whom were really trying and just not getting the help they needed in the way they needed it. All the things that we were “trained to do” basically catered to the students struggling the most and left the most talented students to fend for themselves.⁷ I have absolutely no problem helping the students struggling the most; I think I demonstrated that with the patience I had in dealing with some very confused questions in office hours. Sometimes this required going back through years of accumulated misunderstandings to get to the real source of the problem, but I don’t think I ever became short or condescending to them. But a lot of the things we were told to do were, quite frankly, condescending. I believe that even confused students are not stupid and can quickly recognize when they are being talked down to. There’s a difference between simplifying—what people like Feynman and Preskill do with great skill—and dumbing down; never choose the later.⁸

Even though I ignored this silly advice right from the beginning, I still mostly covered the kinds of things I was supposed to even if it wasn’t necessarily in the way I was supposed to do it. I tried to add some more interesting material as side comments in recitation section or as tangents in the solution sets, but, ignoring my instincts, I still mostly just did what was already done in lecture or on the homework, in painful detail, again in recitation section as I was told to do. Unless you’re completely lost, this would be incredibly boring; and if you’re really that lost, it’s probably just better to go to office hours and get one-on-one help anyway. I wouldn’t have gone to my own early recitation sections if I was an undergrad; in fact, after going to a few as a new freshman and realizing what they’re traditionally about, I never went to another during my entire undergrad career.

In the next post, I’ll describe some memories of my time at the IQI, which, when I thought about them, caused me to give recitation sections that I would have gone to as an undergrad, and which some of the UCSB undergrads seemed to appreciate as well.