3 ms·
he said it himself literally in the preface to the lectures "The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view—which, ho
by anon_tor_12345 5y ago
he said it himself literally in the preface to the lectures
"The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly—understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)"
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_91.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_91.html
- crispyambulance 5y agoI think his remarks need to be put in perspective. Compared to any other college lecturers, how do his lectures measure up? Sure, a couple dozen students who attended out of hundreds perfectly understood everything in the lectures and demonstrated it in exams to Feynman's unreasonably high standards. Does that mean that all of the rest failed to gain any substantial physics knowledge which was valuable in their academic or professional careers? I think not. Looking at the wikipedia entry for the lectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...), it says that Feynman taught "the course" once. It's clearly a beefy 3-course sequence that was taught over the span of 3 years. Sounds like it could have been 1 semester a year for each of the three courses in the physics intro sequence. How many students is that? Somewhere in the low hundreds, I guess. 5-10% of the students with "perfect" scores could be "two dozen". That's not unusual and not a failure if larger fractions got a good-enough grounding in physics at Caltech to proceed. I think they did. Feynman's remarks, I think, are an elliptical self-deprecating way of saying the lectures didn't meet his own standards. That doesn't mean they were "a failure".
- anon_tor_12345 5y agoi'll leave it to the guy who designed and ran the course to give me an assessment of it over some random that wishfully compiles circumstantial evidence (like how long the courses were taught for).