Lec 7 | MIT 5.95J Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering, Spring 2009

The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license.

Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer

high-quality educational resources for free.

To make a donation, or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses,

visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu.

Ok. Welcome back, everyone.

And me too.

So, I just came back from Boulder, where I gave - let's see - eight talks.

Uh, I was on 7 panels, and gave one separate talk. Most on education.

And one of the talks, was on teaching how to think, or what to think.

So there were three panelists, one professor from Berkeley,

in the astronomy department, who's also a renowned teacher,

and then an investigative journalist, and then I spoke,

and we all said something for about ten minutes

I talked about the history of education and why it's difficult to change

educational institutions and educational practices

and what the original purposes of the schools were.

So, some of the material I'll talk about in the second to last lecture,

on political barriers to educational change, uh, and, I then also, before this

whole session I described to the reporter for the Daily Camera,

which is the paper in Boulder, a bit about what I was gonna say.

And I talked about some of the material I've told you already, about the

multiplication table. So, if you remember, the multiplication table, when people get brain damage

in the arithmetic area, they can't do addition anymore, but they can still do the multiplication table.

And when people get brain damage in the language area,

they can still do addition, but they can't multiplication anymore.

And that's because, multiplication generally is learnt as pause [sound of writing on blackboard]

So when you see it, you think of symbols in math, but actually the way most

people learn it is six times nine is fifty-four.

Then, you have to learn [sound of writing]... you have to memorize yet another fact.

Nine times six is fifty-four. Oh. And then you have to learn yet a new fact, called, that

these two facts are related. When, actually if you understood the meaning,

they would be just one fact.

So, now you have to memorize all these linguistic sentences, and

no surprise, when you get damage in the linguistic area, that kind of multiplication table goes away.

So I said to the reporter, yeah, what we really need to do is teach multiplication, and math, in a whole different way.

So the reporter, uh, you know, she understood everything, and said

"Oh, that's really interesting, you know, I'm actually studying education myself, and I have children,

and I'll try to apply with my children, and in the teaching that I do."

And I said, "Oh, great." So then, I gave my talk and then the moderator asked everybody, "well

does anyone on the panel want to say anything to anyone else."

So Alex Philapenco, from Berkeley, he stood up and he said,

"Well, I agree with, you know I agreed with, everything Sanjoy said,

except, he was quoted in the paper this morning as saying we shouldn't

teach the multiplication table. So, that whole discussion, which seemed

to be completely understood, just got condensed into one sentence. So now,

I didn't actually have to say very much in response, because the second panelist,

as I mentioned, was an investigative journalist, and what she was talking about

was how you have to be very skeptical of what's in the media,

so all I had to do was look at her for a bit, and then everybody started laughing because,

the point was clear, but then I explained to everybody else

what I'd explained to the reporter. So, that's by way of saying that education is a complicated

subject, but the audience understands a lot more than the media does,

which is one of the barriers to political change

that, there's people who understand lots of individual points, but how do you

assemble it into a coherent plan for change, well, you need forums for discussion

and if ther reports in the media are, oh, don't teach the multiplication table,

or, do teach it but do it with lots of drill, well, it's hard to get in a discussion

of, well, actually, you'd like to teach it in a different way, where

instead of memorizing this, you say, well, six times nine,

[sound of writing on blackboard]

is like six times ten, which is 60 minus six, which is 54.

SO, there's no space for putting things like that into public discussion.

And one of the purposes of classes like this is to do that.

Uh, OK, so, today we're going to talk about

lecture planning and performing. Uh, what we've done so far is,

sort of the flow of the ideas in this class has gone as follows

now this is the logicial flow, we did it slightly out of order, because it's the preperation flow, slightly

different than the logical flow.

So you work out your course goals or even your curriculum goals,

And then, you decide how are you going to tell when you've reached those goals,

with problems, tests, that's the way you operationalize your goals

And then given that you have those kind of problems, well now you have a

pretty concrete idea of what it is you're trying for, because you have concrete examples of it

well, lectures, recitations, so I'll put etc. here

what do you do with your contact time.

So, this is what do you do with, this is, the overall structure, this is sort of at the level

where it makes concrete sense, and this is, what do you do when the rubber hits the road,

what do you do in lecture.

So, last time what we did is we talked about interactive teaching,

and there was, basically several time scales over which you could make the class interactive.

The longest time scale was the wood blocks example,

and I'll answer a question about that in just a moment.

So now, continuing the theme of where the rubber hits the road,

today, [writing sounds]

so, now, how, now that you have some techniques, how do you

assemble it into a lecture? And I use both words advisedly and deliberately,

so plan, it is essential to plan and performance is essential.

People forget that. They forget that lecturing and teaching is a public act,

and, when they forget that, the lectures are flat. So, we're going to talk about the techniques

for doing that, starting with the Walter Lumen lecture that you watched for today.