8 ms·

Richard Feynman on education in Brazil

152 points by btmorex 15y ago

TheAmazingIdiot 15y ago
Surely you jest. This IS about the movie Brazil, right? Wow, I mean, just wow.
zwischenzug 15y ago
When I started working with Indians, this is exactly what it reminded me of. "Yes, ftp is the file transfer protocol, used to move files" "Can you ftp the files up please?" "No, I have never used it"
- rdtsc 15y ago
  Now you'll probably be downvoted for not being politically correct, but I agree with you. At least in my experience, most Indian-educated graduates I have worked with, were very willing to use a slew of acronyms to somehow trying to convince others that if they know the acronym, then they "understand" the concept. It is hard to describe it. You'll notice it when you encounter it.
  - zwischenzug 15y ago
    It's the lack of education in the broader sense. I weed so many out in interview with simple comprehension questions. The trouble is that their education system and culture does them such a disservice that it's hard to spot the good ones in amongst the dross.
    - microarchitect 15y ago
      I'm not sure why you think it's question of culture. There are plenty of people of Indian origin in the US who have fairly strong ties to Indian culture, but I've never heard any complaints about them being unable to understand stuff.
      - zwischenzug 15y ago
        They were raised in the US?
        pckhoi 15y ago
        rather they conform to the US way, more likely. Local custom matters.
      - raghava 15y ago
        Culture does matter. In India, boasting about ranks/marks of one's kids is pretty much a cultural thing, everyone does that, with an enormous pride. This breeds a batch of kids who want marks and not the knowledge or understanding of things. Almost everything is a darned 1/2/5/10 marks question. Even the interested ones are forced to conform and be one in the herd. Indian social framework by large kills creativity and promotes rote learning, and the effects thus seen are quite well known and obvious.
        microarchitect 15y ago
        Culture does matter. In India, boasting about ranks/marks of one's kids is pretty much a cultural thing, everyone does that, with an enormous pride. This breeds a batch of kids who want marks and not the knowledge or understanding of things. Fair enough. I agree with this. Almost everything is a darned 1/2/5/10 marks question. Even the interested ones are forced to conform and be one in the herd. This maybe true, but I'm also not completely convinced. I don't think we lack creativity - there are any number of stories of 'jugaad' I could bring up here to make my point. We do attempt to conform a lot though - but even the Japanese do that and they don't seem to lack any creativity. Indian social framework by large kills creativity and promotes rote learning, and the effects thus seen are quite well known and obvious. Perhaps, I'm misunderstanding you, but the claim that the Indian social framework kills creativity is not at all obvious to me. My thinking is that the middle class promotes rote learning because it values education and doesn't know the difference between real understanding and rote learning. I once heard a really well-known American professor say "most people don't like thinking" and sometimes I think is true pretty much everywhere in the world. If you look at the Americans and kind of dumb ideas a significant minority of them have about any number of issues (evolution, Islam, Obama's birth, Saddam, the Iraq War) it's quite clear they lack some basic reasoning skills. Therefore, I suggest the following (intentionally controversial) hypothesis. Only the smartest 25% of people are actually capable of thinking. Perhaps, in the US, it turns out that this set is a superset of those employed in technology companies. In India, through an accident of economic circumstances, this is not the case. This is probably why we see so many instances of "dumb Indian software developers".
- raghava 15y ago
  > working with Indians Few Indians, you mean. (Though a majority of them would end up in that 'few' category)
  - zwischenzug 15y ago
    Um, what?
    - raghava 15y ago
      I was merely remarking upon the fact that your comment classified all Indians in one category, that of folks who mug up jargon, acronyms and definitions but are not really knowledgeable about the actual usage. However, let me assure you, not all Indians are like that. There are Indians with reasonable thoughts and rational curiosity. In all your interactions you might not have seen such kind, that's certainly unfortunate.
      - Retric 15y ago
        While my sample size is small < 50. I have seen both types of Indians and yet, I would be willing to suggest that Most Indians who end up as programming H1b's have similar issues. My guess is it's jarring for people because the people who get into software in India are the mostly the type of people who would do something else in the US. PS: Still it's hard not to draw concussions about a country even know that your samples are biased.
        zwischenzug 15y ago
        My sample size is around 200. Interestingly, I interviewed one fantastic Indian woman. Turned out, she'd been schooled by Catholics.
      - zwischenzug 15y ago
        Indeed, that's why I didn't say: "all Indians are like this". It's just surprising how many graduates from Indian universities seem to be completely uneducated in a broader sense. It makes one realise the value of (or problems arising from) common unspoken assumptions.
iaskwhy 15y ago
It does sound familiar maybe because I'm from Portugal. One day at school, at some physics class about Newton's laws of motion, my colleagues weren't understanding it so I tried to explain them how that would be helpful by using a very stupid example: let's pretend you are at the window of your room, say on the 5th floor, and you want to spit on someone who is walking towards the direction of the window. If you drop some saliva it will reach the floor in x seconds. So how many seconds before should you spit to hit that person on the head if he's y meters away from the position of your window at the ground level? Oh, remeber it's a sunny day with no wind at all. So there I was with the most stupid example I could think of and what was their reaction? They were absolutely amazed by it and some minutes later I had a correct answer.
r0s 15y ago
Most interesting thing I read today, thanks!
- farnsworth 15y ago
  Then this will be the most interesting book you've read this year: http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041 http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...
rdtsc 15y ago
I think a lot of this starts with developing and maintaining a healthy curiosity and a love of learning. Perhaps all the children are naturally curious and want to learn different things about the world but eventually they go through education systems that beat that out of them. The education systems of many countries are based on rote learning. It is unfortunate and a cheap shortcut to take for both the students and the teacher. The student doesn't have to waste time understanding and the teacher doesn't have to waste time making sure every student understood. "Did they repeat what was said to them? Good" -- Check. Move on to the next grade. "Not my problem anymore".
microarchitect 15y ago
The problem boils down to just one thing. The teachers don't understand what they're teaching themselves, so they confuse memorization and repetition with learning. The students who are good at this are rewarded because they do better in the exams, and slowly but surely all the joy of understanding science is beaten out of a student. I can relate to this personally. Until I started college, I really understood what I was learning. I enjoyed doing science and reading about. But then I made the biggest mistake of my life - I didn't put enough effort into preparing for the IIT entrance examinations and didn't make it in. I started at the second-tier college that I went to and I realized that my teachers didn't know what they were teaching. We were supposed to be learning all this stuff about Fourier series and Laplace transforms, and I couldn't figure out where we were going with all this. I couldn't understand why certain assumptions were made and where they mattered in the proofs. It was all going above my head. When I asked my lecturers, I was branded as a disruptive student. I simply got insulted until I learned to keep my mouth shut. I didn't do very well in my examinations either. The most marks were given to the students who could reproduce what the teacher said in the cleanest handwriting with the best figures. My writing sucked and my figures were dirty, and I wrote what I understood not what I remembered. I simply had no hope. A few years later I started a master's degree at a top-tier institution. Man, was this a different experience! I realized I could ask questions and get intelligent answers. I realized my professors actually knew what these proofs were going to useful for! I was finally back in an environment where understanding was valued. Unfortunately, I still haven't recovered fully. I can see myself understanding more stuff than in the past, but it's something I have to force myself to do. I use tricks I learned from Feynman and others - I try to build a visual model in my head as I'm hearing something and then I ask questions to the model to see if I'm really understanding stuff. I force myself to think about stuff all time. But this process is not automatic, and I can't help but think my undergraduate lecturers beat it out of me.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- raghava 15y ago
  In India, usually people who could not land a plum corporate job would resort to teaching (UG level) and they are entrusted with the job of shaping the next batch of engineers/artists. Also, teaching as a job is not greatly rewarding financially, hence it is not a popular choice. One could only imagine the outcome. To state the facts, a school teacher teaching 4/5th grade kids would hardly be given a $150 salary. In second tier cities, it's even lesser. I would say, not just this, but there is also a huge difference in the line of thought and a tendency to resign oneself to fate, among Indians. That is almost always part of the upbringing. The ones landing up as teachers would resign to their fates and stop (and resist vehemently) any attempt to keep oneself up-to-date or develop their skills. And the sad part is, even the interested ones are forcibly turned into indifferent ones, due to various socio-cultural changes presently seen in the economically shining nation. A relevant article: http://www.hindu.com/op/2011/04/24/stories/2011042453622000.htm http://www.hindu.com/op/2011/04/24/stories/2011042453622000....
gcb 15y ago
so precise it's scary. Dropped out of the prestigious, public, academia in brazil. and after my second (failed) company got my degree from one of the smaller, less prestigious ones. Had lots of experimentation though
- zalew 15y ago
  I don't know if it's too much offtopic, because it's about elementary school, but hey, let's go: I went to first 2 classes of a private school in Sao Paulo in '89-'90. I was a smart kid and had 9.5-10.0 average (0-10.0 scale) despite I had to learn the language at first. One day in class, the teacher of biology (or sth like that) started talking about fish and stated that a dolphin is a fish. I argued with her saying it's a mammal, she said I was wrong, I didn't give up, but for the moment it was case closed. After a few days on the next lesson with her, she raised the topic once again to say that I was partly correct, because a dolphin is a "mammal-fish". We've had a laugh with my parents to this day, and I was always wondering how high school and college education works around there if a science teacher in elementary school can be so dumb. Our education system in Poland is far from perfect, not to say completely broken, but I must say that at least teachers in elementary have the basic knowledge not to miseducate kids.
  - gcb 15y ago
    haha i can relate to that too. on 3rd grade i argued with my science teacher when she 'taught' us that the Moon was bigger than Earth. or something as bad as that. She kept her point and i mine until she sent me to the principal for disrupting her class. Principal lost words when i explained her the reason I was there
    - zalew 15y ago
      hah, looks like it's quite common :) sad though...
thiagofm 15y ago
First of all, I'm brazilian. I study computer science and things are bad here. I'm very lucky to be able to understand english well enough to have studied most of courses MIT OCW have that are interesting to me. Teachers here "teach" in a different way, it's sad. Currently, there's much potential being lost. People here are educated to get a job and work to buy a car, house and consume a lot, which is actually perfect how the way things are in the world right now(be careful US, we have more stupid consumers than you). They are good robots to get things done to get paid. They need a boss basically, they are educated to be the employee. Awesome for US companies that come here. I see a good future ahead for our economy, but who is going to get really rich here are people from the outside, the rest are basically going to beneficit from a higher salary and more power to consume crap.
- dguaraglia 15y ago
  Well, I lived in Brazil for 7 years, and only recently (like, a couple weeks ago) moved back to the US. What I could never understand is how you could trust a programmer that doesn't speak (and read) fluent English. Not being facetious here, but the fact is most good documentation is in English. I was the lucky exception while back in Argentina, but I feel that's still a widespread problem in Brazil. A pity though, because I know for a fact there's plenty of great talent there.
  - thiagofm 15y ago
    There's talent everywhere. Every human is talented but the environment that is around that human kills it. I feel lucky to have my english to the level that is right now and still live here. But I believe you are right, most of brazilian programmers are into java/c# because you can learn it in portuguese(books)... no problem. But try to learn some node.js or anything new not being able to speak english... It's impossible. There's barely doc in english... The education system sucks.
tybris 15y ago
Ouch, if they don't learn science, how will they ever appreciate the enormous wealth and beauty that is right in their backyard?
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Most of us don't :-( But don't feel too good about it. Science teaching is, for all I can gather, going down the drain just about everywhere.
- bitwize 15y ago
  They have Andressa Vieira. That's beauty enough for any man.
ojosilva 15y ago
Just for clarification: Richard Feynman, Nobel physicist wrote this piece about his experiences teaching in Brazil in... 1950. So I don't think this is a very precise account of education in Brazil nowadays, but it sure does sound like education there (and almost anywhere else) in the 50s -- my mom tells me she would read out loud to herself until dawn the day before an exam, as she was taught auditory learning. This is not so common now as it was then. But I agree that unfortunately, to this day, in any country and most schools out there, science is still taught to a large extent through dumb memorization and automatic formula application. Thus Feynman critique stands fresh and sound despite the anachronism. I feel education hasn't advanced nearly as fast as science, math, technology and society in the last century and a half. (BTW, Feynman was infatuated with Brazil, and used to visit the country often. He even dressed up for carnival in Rio once: http://goo.gl/3p5RS http://goo.gl/3p5RS -- I wish he would tell more about that in his autobiography, instead of such a broad generalization of his experience teaching there.)
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It's soul-crushing to read this, isn't it? Every day I am confronted with former students who have been taught like this. I took fluid dynamics 3 times, until I found a teacher willing to teach it instead of just letting us memorize the whole thing. When you really understand a subject, it's like hitting the light switch and realizing you were in a dark room. I feel for those who live their professional lives in dark rooms. OTOH, I am sure Mr. Feynman was no ordinary teacher himself. His students were very, very lucky. His bar was unusually high, impossibly high for many teachers.
  - palish 15y ago
    See for yourself. Richard Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SrHzSGn-I8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SrHzSGn-I8 Richard Feynman - The Distinction of Past and Future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY&feature=relat... Richard Feynman - Law of Gravitation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-wfpsmtyU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-wfpsmtyU&feature=mfu_i... There are about 7 lectures total. They are all amazing. (EDIT: Looks like they aren't all on Youtube. Watch them here: http://www.fotuva.org/news/project_tuva.html http://www.fotuva.org/news/project_tuva.html )
kalid 15y ago
I love this story because as Feynman puts it, there's a difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing it. Since we're on the topic of light -- despite going to a great school and taking several physics courses, I suffered from a severe misconception until about a month ago. Maybe you have it too. Think about a light wave. You might imagine a diagram like this: http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/Wave.png http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/Wave.pn... Yep, you've seen it a million times. Light is a wave and wiggles up and down... right? Oh really? Do you think the fastest thing the universe travels in a zigzag pattern? Hey, why don't we beat the speed of light by moving on a straight line! Nobel prize time! No, the y-axis is amplitude of the field. The graph is not a Family-circus dotted line following the particle's motion! A better diagram may be this: http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/wave_amplitude_line.png http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/wave_am... It's the intensity of the wave which is varying. But we memorize the "light is a wiggling wave" diagram and wind up with a severe misconception. (Shameless plug: I blog at http://betterexplained.com http://betterexplained.com and try to hammer away at the insights that have befuddled me.)
- rprospero 15y ago
  First off, thank you for pointing this out. I occasionally teach introductory physics and I had never realized that people could interpret the graph in that manner. I'll try to make nip this in the bud when I present this material in the future. Your alternate graph, however, shows another common misconception that is matched in your text. Specifically, the amplitude of the wave varies, but the intensity does NOT. The amplitude being graphed can be though of as the strength of the electric field pointing.... how about to the north? Then, when the amplitude is negative, all that's happening is that the field is point to the south, instead of the north. The intensity of the light is the energy contained within the electromagnetic field, which is independent of which direction the field is point. Thus, where you have dark spots in the graph where the amplitude goes negative, the intensity of the light is just as strong as it was at the peaks. The obvious next question is what happens when the amplitude is zero? Well, the changing electric field produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field reaches its maximum value where the electric field goes to zero and goes to zero itself at the minima and maxima of the electric field's amplitude. Thus, the total energy electromagnetic energy, and, therefore, the intensity of the light, is constant across the whole graph. That's why I'm cautious about using your proposed diagram. I've known many students with the misconception that light alternates between bright and dark as it travels and that lines up exactly with what you've drawn.
gnosis 15y ago
"One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”" This is not just a Brazilian problem. Much of the university education in the US is the same. Very few students ask questions and consider question asking to be a waste of time. Rote memorization just to pass tests is sadly all too prevalent in US universities as well.
- javanix 15y ago
  Well, in the US at least its kind of impossible to pass math/engineering exams without having some sort of deeper understanding of the problem. It sounds like the exams in Brazil at the time didn't expand upon anything past memorized definitions - I think you'd be hard pressed to find a serious physics course in the US that would let you get away with that.
- zwischenzug 15y ago
  I remember sitting in a class at Columbia and wondering why students were asking so many pointless questions, designed to show how much they knew rather than establish anything useful. In my university (Oxford, Modern History) you feared looking stupid by asking questions at lectures, and instead asked your friends afterwards and read up yourself. Different cultures, none are perfect, I guess. I imagine Feynman's lectures would have made me feel "too stupid to ask". Probably says more about me than him :)
guelo 15y ago
so have they figured out what triboluminescence is yet?
- amesign 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence#Mechanism_of_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence#Mechanism_of_...
olh 15y ago
Brazilian CS undergrad here. Although this is a 50's view, some aspects are still valid. I study in a technical park inside one of the biggest hydroelectric dams in the world. Some of my professors are renowned engineers working in the dam; but many others are unqualified and became professors just by passing an admission test. The thing is: my university is public and once you are in, as a professor or student, you will only get out if you decide so or if you do something seriously unethical. So, as a professor, if you are in, you can do almost whatever you want: you won't be fired. You can produce shitty research papers because you do not need to have "results" like in the private sector; and it's the same for the teaching.
- Symbiont 15y ago
  Another brazilian CS undergrad here. Sadly, I can vouch for what olh said.. In some worst cases, teachers at public universities decide not to show up at classes.
  - deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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152 points by btmorex 15y ago

Surely you jest. This IS about the movie Brazil, right? Wow, I mean, just wow.

When I started working with Indians, this is exactly what it reminded me of. "Yes, ftp is the file transfer protocol, used to move files" "Can you ftp the files up please?" "No, I have never used it"

rdtsc 15y ago
Now you'll probably be downvoted for not being politically correct, but I agree with you. At least in my experience, most Indian-educated graduates I have worked with, were very willing to use a slew of acronyms to somehow trying to convince others that if they know the acronym, then they "understand" the concept. It is hard to describe it. You'll notice it when you encounter it.
- zwischenzug 15y ago
  It's the lack of education in the broader sense. I weed so many out in interview with simple comprehension questions. The trouble is that their education system and culture does them such a disservice that it's hard to spot the good ones in amongst the dross.
  - microarchitect 15y ago
    I'm not sure why you think it's question of culture. There are plenty of people of Indian origin in the US who have fairly strong ties to Indian culture, but I've never heard any complaints about them being unable to understand stuff.
    - zwischenzug 15y ago
      They were raised in the US?
      - pckhoi 15y ago
        rather they conform to the US way, more likely. Local custom matters.
    - raghava 15y ago
      Culture does matter. In India, boasting about ranks/marks of one's kids is pretty much a cultural thing, everyone does that, with an enormous pride. This breeds a batch of kids who want marks and not the knowledge or understanding of things. Almost everything is a darned 1/2/5/10 marks question. Even the interested ones are forced to conform and be one in the herd. Indian social framework by large kills creativity and promotes rote learning, and the effects thus seen are quite well known and obvious.
      - microarchitect 15y ago
        Culture does matter. In India, boasting about ranks/marks of one's kids is pretty much a cultural thing, everyone does that, with an enormous pride. This breeds a batch of kids who want marks and not the knowledge or understanding of things. Fair enough. I agree with this. Almost everything is a darned 1/2/5/10 marks question. Even the interested ones are forced to conform and be one in the herd. This maybe true, but I'm also not completely convinced. I don't think we lack creativity - there are any number of stories of 'jugaad' I could bring up here to make my point. We do attempt to conform a lot though - but even the Japanese do that and they don't seem to lack any creativity. Indian social framework by large kills creativity and promotes rote learning, and the effects thus seen are quite well known and obvious. Perhaps, I'm misunderstanding you, but the claim that the Indian social framework kills creativity is not at all obvious to me. My thinking is that the middle class promotes rote learning because it values education and doesn't know the difference between real understanding and rote learning. I once heard a really well-known American professor say "most people don't like thinking" and sometimes I think is true pretty much everywhere in the world. If you look at the Americans and kind of dumb ideas a significant minority of them have about any number of issues (evolution, Islam, Obama's birth, Saddam, the Iraq War) it's quite clear they lack some basic reasoning skills. Therefore, I suggest the following (intentionally controversial) hypothesis. Only the smartest 25% of people are actually capable of thinking. Perhaps, in the US, it turns out that this set is a superset of those employed in technology companies. In India, through an accident of economic circumstances, this is not the case. This is probably why we see so many instances of "dumb Indian software developers".
raghava 15y ago
> working with Indians Few Indians, you mean. (Though a majority of them would end up in that 'few' category)
- zwischenzug 15y ago
  Um, what?
  - raghava 15y ago
    I was merely remarking upon the fact that your comment classified all Indians in one category, that of folks who mug up jargon, acronyms and definitions but are not really knowledgeable about the actual usage. However, let me assure you, not all Indians are like that. There are Indians with reasonable thoughts and rational curiosity. In all your interactions you might not have seen such kind, that's certainly unfortunate.
    - Retric 15y ago
      While my sample size is small < 50. I have seen both types of Indians and yet, I would be willing to suggest that Most Indians who end up as programming H1b's have similar issues. My guess is it's jarring for people because the people who get into software in India are the mostly the type of people who would do something else in the US. PS: Still it's hard not to draw concussions about a country even know that your samples are biased.
      - zwischenzug 15y ago
        My sample size is around 200. Interestingly, I interviewed one fantastic Indian woman. Turned out, she'd been schooled by Catholics.
    - zwischenzug 15y ago
      Indeed, that's why I didn't say: "all Indians are like this". It's just surprising how many graduates from Indian universities seem to be completely uneducated in a broader sense. It makes one realise the value of (or problems arising from) common unspoken assumptions.

iaskwhy 15y ago

It does sound familiar maybe because I'm from Portugal. One day at school, at some physics class about Newton's laws of motion, my colleagues weren't understanding it so I tried to explain them how that would be helpful by using a very stupid example: let's pretend you are at the window of your room, say on the 5th floor, and you want to spit on someone who is walking towards the direction of the window. If you drop some saliva it will reach the floor in x seconds. So how many seconds before should you spit to hit that person on the head if he's y meters away from the position of your window at the ground level? Oh, remeber it's a sunny day with no wind at all. So there I was with the most stupid example I could think of and what was their reaction? They were absolutely amazed by it and some minutes later I had a correct answer.

r0s 15y ago

Most interesting thing I read today, thanks!

farnsworth 15y ago
Then this will be the most interesting book you've read this year: http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041 http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

rdtsc 15y ago

I think a lot of this starts with developing and maintaining a healthy curiosity and a love of learning. Perhaps all the children are naturally curious and want to learn different things about the world but eventually they go through education systems that beat that out of them. The education systems of many countries are based on rote learning. It is unfortunate and a cheap shortcut to take for both the students and the teacher. The student doesn't have to waste time understanding and the teacher doesn't have to waste time making sure every student understood. "Did they repeat what was said to them? Good" -- Check. Move on to the next grade. "Not my problem anymore".

microarchitect 15y ago

The problem boils down to just one thing. The teachers don't understand what they're teaching themselves, so they confuse memorization and repetition with learning. The students who are good at this are rewarded because they do better in the exams, and slowly but surely all the joy of understanding science is beaten out of a student. I can relate to this personally. Until I started college, I really understood what I was learning. I enjoyed doing science and reading about. But then I made the biggest mistake of my life - I didn't put enough effort into preparing for the IIT entrance examinations and didn't make it in. I started at the second-tier college that I went to and I realized that my teachers didn't know what they were teaching. We were supposed to be learning all this stuff about Fourier series and Laplace transforms, and I couldn't figure out where we were going with all this. I couldn't understand why certain assumptions were made and where they mattered in the proofs. It was all going above my head. When I asked my lecturers, I was branded as a disruptive student. I simply got insulted until I learned to keep my mouth shut. I didn't do very well in my examinations either. The most marks were given to the students who could reproduce what the teacher said in the cleanest handwriting with the best figures. My writing sucked and my figures were dirty, and I wrote what I understood not what I remembered. I simply had no hope. A few years later I started a master's degree at a top-tier institution. Man, was this a different experience! I realized I could ask questions and get intelligent answers. I realized my professors actually knew what these proofs were going to useful for! I was finally back in an environment where understanding was valued. Unfortunately, I still haven't recovered fully. I can see myself understanding more stuff than in the past, but it's something I have to force myself to do. I use tricks I learned from Feynman and others - I try to build a visual model in my head as I'm hearing something and then I ask questions to the model to see if I'm really understanding stuff. I force myself to think about stuff all time. But this process is not automatic, and I can't help but think my undergraduate lecturers beat it out of me.

deleted 15y ago
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raghava 15y ago
In India, usually people who could not land a plum corporate job would resort to teaching (UG level) and they are entrusted with the job of shaping the next batch of engineers/artists. Also, teaching as a job is not greatly rewarding financially, hence it is not a popular choice. One could only imagine the outcome. To state the facts, a school teacher teaching 4/5th grade kids would hardly be given a $150 salary. In second tier cities, it's even lesser. I would say, not just this, but there is also a huge difference in the line of thought and a tendency to resign oneself to fate, among Indians. That is almost always part of the upbringing. The ones landing up as teachers would resign to their fates and stop (and resist vehemently) any attempt to keep oneself up-to-date or develop their skills. And the sad part is, even the interested ones are forcibly turned into indifferent ones, due to various socio-cultural changes presently seen in the economically shining nation. A relevant article: http://www.hindu.com/op/2011/04/24/stories/2011042453622000.htm http://www.hindu.com/op/2011/04/24/stories/2011042453622000....

gcb 15y ago

so precise it's scary. Dropped out of the prestigious, public, academia in brazil. and after my second (failed) company got my degree from one of the smaller, less prestigious ones. Had lots of experimentation though

zalew 15y ago
I don't know if it's too much offtopic, because it's about elementary school, but hey, let's go: I went to first 2 classes of a private school in Sao Paulo in '89-'90. I was a smart kid and had 9.5-10.0 average (0-10.0 scale) despite I had to learn the language at first. One day in class, the teacher of biology (or sth like that) started talking about fish and stated that a dolphin is a fish. I argued with her saying it's a mammal, she said I was wrong, I didn't give up, but for the moment it was case closed. After a few days on the next lesson with her, she raised the topic once again to say that I was partly correct, because a dolphin is a "mammal-fish". We've had a laugh with my parents to this day, and I was always wondering how high school and college education works around there if a science teacher in elementary school can be so dumb. Our education system in Poland is far from perfect, not to say completely broken, but I must say that at least teachers in elementary have the basic knowledge not to miseducate kids.
- gcb 15y ago
  haha i can relate to that too. on 3rd grade i argued with my science teacher when she 'taught' us that the Moon was bigger than Earth. or something as bad as that. She kept her point and i mine until she sent me to the principal for disrupting her class. Principal lost words when i explained her the reason I was there
  - zalew 15y ago
    hah, looks like it's quite common :) sad though...

thiagofm 15y ago

First of all, I'm brazilian. I study computer science and things are bad here. I'm very lucky to be able to understand english well enough to have studied most of courses MIT OCW have that are interesting to me. Teachers here "teach" in a different way, it's sad. Currently, there's much potential being lost. People here are educated to get a job and work to buy a car, house and consume a lot, which is actually perfect how the way things are in the world right now(be careful US, we have more stupid consumers than you). They are good robots to get things done to get paid. They need a boss basically, they are educated to be the employee. Awesome for US companies that come here. I see a good future ahead for our economy, but who is going to get really rich here are people from the outside, the rest are basically going to beneficit from a higher salary and more power to consume crap.

dguaraglia 15y ago
Well, I lived in Brazil for 7 years, and only recently (like, a couple weeks ago) moved back to the US. What I could never understand is how you could trust a programmer that doesn't speak (and read) fluent English. Not being facetious here, but the fact is most good documentation is in English. I was the lucky exception while back in Argentina, but I feel that's still a widespread problem in Brazil. A pity though, because I know for a fact there's plenty of great talent there.
- thiagofm 15y ago
  There's talent everywhere. Every human is talented but the environment that is around that human kills it. I feel lucky to have my english to the level that is right now and still live here. But I believe you are right, most of brazilian programmers are into java/c# because you can learn it in portuguese(books)... no problem. But try to learn some node.js or anything new not being able to speak english... It's impossible. There's barely doc in english... The education system sucks.

tybris 15y ago

Ouch, if they don't learn science, how will they ever appreciate the enormous wealth and beauty that is right in their backyard?

rbanffy 15y ago
Most of us don't :-( But don't feel too good about it. Science teaching is, for all I can gather, going down the drain just about everywhere.
bitwize 15y ago
They have Andressa Vieira. That's beauty enough for any man.

ojosilva 15y ago

Just for clarification: Richard Feynman, Nobel physicist wrote this piece about his experiences teaching in Brazil in... 1950. So I don't think this is a very precise account of education in Brazil nowadays, but it sure does sound like education there (and almost anywhere else) in the 50s -- my mom tells me she would read out loud to herself until dawn the day before an exam, as she was taught auditory learning. This is not so common now as it was then. But I agree that unfortunately, to this day, in any country and most schools out there, science is still taught to a large extent through dumb memorization and automatic formula application. Thus Feynman critique stands fresh and sound despite the anachronism. I feel education hasn't advanced nearly as fast as science, math, technology and society in the last century and a half. (BTW, Feynman was infatuated with Brazil, and used to visit the country often. He even dressed up for carnival in Rio once: http://goo.gl/3p5RS http://goo.gl/3p5RS -- I wish he would tell more about that in his autobiography, instead of such a broad generalization of his experience teaching there.)

rbanffy 15y ago
It's soul-crushing to read this, isn't it? Every day I am confronted with former students who have been taught like this. I took fluid dynamics 3 times, until I found a teacher willing to teach it instead of just letting us memorize the whole thing. When you really understand a subject, it's like hitting the light switch and realizing you were in a dark room. I feel for those who live their professional lives in dark rooms. OTOH, I am sure Mr. Feynman was no ordinary teacher himself. His students were very, very lucky. His bar was unusually high, impossibly high for many teachers.
- palish 15y ago
  See for yourself. Richard Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SrHzSGn-I8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SrHzSGn-I8 Richard Feynman - The Distinction of Past and Future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY&feature=relat... Richard Feynman - Law of Gravitation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-wfpsmtyU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-wfpsmtyU&feature=mfu_i... There are about 7 lectures total. They are all amazing. (EDIT: Looks like they aren't all on Youtube. Watch them here: http://www.fotuva.org/news/project_tuva.html http://www.fotuva.org/news/project_tuva.html )

kalid 15y ago

I love this story because as Feynman puts it, there's a difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing it. Since we're on the topic of light -- despite going to a great school and taking several physics courses, I suffered from a severe misconception until about a month ago. Maybe you have it too. Think about a light wave. You might imagine a diagram like this: http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/Wave.png http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/Wave.pn... Yep, you've seen it a million times. Light is a wave and wiggles up and down... right? Oh really? Do you think the fastest thing the universe travels in a zigzag pattern? Hey, why don't we beat the speed of light by moving on a straight line! Nobel prize time! No, the y-axis is amplitude of the field. The graph is not a Family-circus dotted line following the particle's motion! A better diagram may be this: http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/wave_amplitude_line.png http://betterexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/graphs/wave_am... It's the intensity of the wave which is varying. But we memorize the "light is a wiggling wave" diagram and wind up with a severe misconception. (Shameless plug: I blog at http://betterexplained.com http://betterexplained.com and try to hammer away at the insights that have befuddled me.)

rprospero 15y ago
First off, thank you for pointing this out. I occasionally teach introductory physics and I had never realized that people could interpret the graph in that manner. I'll try to make nip this in the bud when I present this material in the future. Your alternate graph, however, shows another common misconception that is matched in your text. Specifically, the amplitude of the wave varies, but the intensity does NOT. The amplitude being graphed can be though of as the strength of the electric field pointing.... how about to the north? Then, when the amplitude is negative, all that's happening is that the field is point to the south, instead of the north. The intensity of the light is the energy contained within the electromagnetic field, which is independent of which direction the field is point. Thus, where you have dark spots in the graph where the amplitude goes negative, the intensity of the light is just as strong as it was at the peaks. The obvious next question is what happens when the amplitude is zero? Well, the changing electric field produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field reaches its maximum value where the electric field goes to zero and goes to zero itself at the minima and maxima of the electric field's amplitude. Thus, the total energy electromagnetic energy, and, therefore, the intensity of the light, is constant across the whole graph. That's why I'm cautious about using your proposed diagram. I've known many students with the misconception that light alternates between bright and dark as it travels and that lines up exactly with what you've drawn.

gnosis 15y ago

"One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”" This is not just a Brazilian problem. Much of the university education in the US is the same. Very few students ask questions and consider question asking to be a waste of time. Rote memorization just to pass tests is sadly all too prevalent in US universities as well.

javanix 15y ago
Well, in the US at least its kind of impossible to pass math/engineering exams without having some sort of deeper understanding of the problem. It sounds like the exams in Brazil at the time didn't expand upon anything past memorized definitions - I think you'd be hard pressed to find a serious physics course in the US that would let you get away with that.
zwischenzug 15y ago
I remember sitting in a class at Columbia and wondering why students were asking so many pointless questions, designed to show how much they knew rather than establish anything useful. In my university (Oxford, Modern History) you feared looking stupid by asking questions at lectures, and instead asked your friends afterwards and read up yourself. Different cultures, none are perfect, I guess. I imagine Feynman's lectures would have made me feel "too stupid to ask". Probably says more about me than him :)

guelo 15y ago

so have they figured out what triboluminescence is yet?

amesign 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence#Mechanism_of_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence#Mechanism_of_...

olh 15y ago

Brazilian CS undergrad here. Although this is a 50's view, some aspects are still valid. I study in a technical park inside one of the biggest hydroelectric dams in the world. Some of my professors are renowned engineers working in the dam; but many others are unqualified and became professors just by passing an admission test. The thing is: my university is public and once you are in, as a professor or student, you will only get out if you decide so or if you do something seriously unethical. So, as a professor, if you are in, you can do almost whatever you want: you won't be fired. You can produce shitty research papers because you do not need to have "results" like in the private sector; and it's the same for the teaching.

Symbiont 15y ago
Another brazilian CS undergrad here. Sadly, I can vouch for what olh said.. In some worst cases, teachers at public universities decide not to show up at classes.
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