Awesome

[steuard]

Me: Great! I'm all ready for class: time to introduce magnetic fields and forces.

My Bored Brain: Wow, this looks dull.

Me: Look, it's the first day on a new subject, of course it's a bit dry. But there's some cool stuff in there.

MBB: Important, yes. But seriously: dull. I'm not gonna do it.

Me: We have to do it! I'm already behind what I'd aimed for on the syllabus.

MBB: Not gonna happen. Let's derive magnetism from scratch using electrostatics and relativity instead.

Me: Are you crazy? These guys are bound to be rusty on relativity; they may never have learned it well at all. And we don't have time for long digressions: I've dropped enough material as is.

MBB: Exactly! As the schedule stands, they're going to leave junior/senior E&M without ever hearing that electric and magnetic fields are secretly the same thing. I won't let that happen to any student of mine!

Me: Look, I just can't afford to... hold on... I can't afford... to bore them. How 'bout that.

Me, writing on board at start of class: "Today's plan: Screw it - we're doing something awesome."



Addendum: ukelele points out that by an awesome coincidence, today is The International Day of Awesomeness. Awesome.

Comments

[lordhylas.livejournal.com]

Awesomeness is always good to teach. Personally, I wish that mathematics and physics weren't *so* watered-down early on. It's frustrating for me to keep finding out where there are connections and equalities where previously I'd been told there aren't, or said connections and equalities were just completely omitted. So, earlier the better, in my book.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

A project that's been very distantly on my mind for many years is to write a book with a title something like "Impatient Physics", aimed at maybe a high school level audience. The idea would be to describe the gist of as many awesome facts and interconnections in physics as possible, without spending much if any time doing the math and without getting bogged down with the necessary but less inspiring intermediate details.

Come to think of it, my philosophy for the project is inspired a bit by Feynman's QED. As I'm sure you recall, he describes quantum field theory in a vivid conceptual way, even though his readers have no chance of actually doing any real computation in the field. I would have loved an overview of physics in that style when I was a kid.

[lordhylas.livejournal.com]

Yes! QED is fabulous for people who think the way I do. Conceptual-driven teaching good!

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a fascinating book.

[pearmeson.livejournal.com]

I've had a similar idea in the back of my head for years. My working title was "Physics: The Good Parts".

QED is the most spectacular popularization I have ever seen. His bean counting metaphor of learning "what we're really doing" without needing to learn how to do it efficiently is really powerful. I used it to teach a class on science writing last year (for frosh). It was by far the most successful book I used.