 Hello, everyone. My name is Seth Manukin. I am the director of the communications forum and I am only here to introduce the speakers and then you will no longer need to look at me. The moderator of the conversation is David Thorburn and before I introduce him this is also in some ways a celebration of David's long tenure as director of the forum. Everything that the forum is is because of his through sheer force of his will and intellect. He's been a real driving force and has created something really special here. So I know I owe him a big debt and I think we all owe him a big debt so thank you very much for that David. And there will be a reception following this this being MIT and nothing being simple it is not near where we are but in building 14 and 14 E 303 304 okay 14 E 304 you do not need to go outside to get there and if you don't know where that is you can sort of follow the herd afterwards but we will have refreshments for everyone. So in addition to being the director of merit I said the communications forum David is MIT literature professor and this is I believe his 40th year at MIT is that right? You don't look a day over 50. He started young. He has taught courses ranging from media and transition to comedy and his MIT lecture course the film experience has been taught to undergraduates for more than 35 years and is about to be published on open courseware. He's a past winner of MIT's McVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Next to him is Robert Pinsky three time US poet laureate the author of 19 books which makes me tired just thinking about and the William Fairfield Warren distinguished professor of English and creative writing at Boston University. He has won the William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago and a lifetime achievement award from the Pan American Center and you are currently working on furthering digital education is that right by teaching the art of poetry through edX. Alan Guth who's immediately next to Robert is MIT's Victor Weisskopf professor of physics pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and another recipient of the McVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. He was an inaugural awardee of the fundamental physics prize and a co-recipient of the 2014 Cavley Prize awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He's a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and his the early universe course is currently available through open course where and on the end of the table Hazel Siv is a biology professor here at MIT principal investigator with the Siv lab and a member of the Whitehead Institute for biomedical research. She has been MIT since 1991 and was the first associate dean of the MIT School of Science. She currently has three biology courses available through open course where and was named a recipient of the winner of the 2015 McVicar award for exemplary contributions to teaching. She's also a great storyteller and I know this because she and I were did a story collider together and in April is going to be telling another story on saved is that right at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science so look out for that. So without any further ado I'll turn it over to them and thank you all for being here. I'd like to thank my distinguished colleagues and panelists for joining me on this what I think of as sort of my farewell forum. I'd also like to remind the audience that one of the signature features of the forum in during my time as director has been interaction with the audience and our usual format which I hope we will follow today is about an hour of discussion among the panelists and an hour with the audience and I hope though I see a number of fellow of our fellow McVicar winners in the audience. I hope that the second part of our conversation in which the audience has asked to participate will be even livelier and more remarkable than the first part. I asked each of our panelists to think about this question before we convene today and I want to ask each of them now to speak very quickly to this question. I asked each of them to think about naming for us and describing for us a memorable teacher from their past and perhaps I should say parenthetically that as I begin teaching has been at the center of my life I realize all my all my all my life it's always been a an activity I took as sort of central to my experience and I think I was always a strong and serious teacher but I came to realize as we approach this forum that I have not too many abstract principles to to suggest about what makes a good teacher and I'm hoping that our conversation will confront that problem about how subjective many of us are about what our what our work involves. In any case I thought I thought that one way of getting at some of the things that are hidden about why we value teaching and what it is in teachers we care about if I would ask these distinguished teachers and practitioners scholars and writers to describe a memorable teacher from their past a teacher who mattered to them very much and let's start with Robert. Thanks David. Pleasure to be here. I'm very glad to have an occasion to pay tribute to Mr. Angus McWithy who was my teacher in the eighth grade in Long Branch, New Jersey in a class it was all boys because it was the bad class and it was a subject that was designed for people who were not destined to go to college and the subject was mechanical drawing. In the first or second meeting of the mechanical drawing class Mr. McWithy told us that I believe this was I think this is the first true intellectual discussion I can ever remember having. It certainly is the first intellectual discussion I can ever remember having in a classroom. McWithy told us that you begin your drawing of an object but first elevation you do is the front of the object and then he said to us what how do you determine the front of an object? If it moves whatever goes first. I see so what is the front of the factory? Well it's where things come in and out so it's the front of the toilet bowl the bottom or the top etc and he got a bunch of I would describe us as would-beath thugs. He got us very interested and arguing with one another and supplying introductions like those objections like those I've mentioned to different theories of what is the front of an object and it isn't where things come in and out it's if a person where a person would come in and out so the front of your car is the side etc and he may have given us the first of those little Socratic demurrers or objections and we were having pleasure in stretching our brain so he took this classroom of official dopes and doing very little and he was a very stern man very strict man doing very little but because he knew a good question when he asked one he got us going the front of an object in the McWithy dictum is the elevation that gives the most information about it okay when David first asked me this question I was in a bit of a conundrum because I really have had a number of great teachers from high school to college to graduate school so I decided to pick one the person I'd like to talk about is a former MIT professor no longer alive named Felix Malours some of you may have known him he was a nuclear theory person in the Center for Theoretical Physics and well I was an undergrad here at MIT and he was our teacher for three terms of theoretical physics the last three terms of the physics major two-term senior year one term junior year and he carried us through one term of classical mechanics if I remember right one term of electromagnetic theory and then one term of quantum theory what characterized his teaching was that he was not at all flamboyant and I have a feeling if you asked any of us sometime in the middle of that three-term stretch did we really think he was a great teacher we probably would have said he was an okay teacher but not necessarily a great teacher but when I began later to study for my general exams when I was a graduate student went back over all those notes I was incredibly impressed with how tremendously well he had organized the material so that everything just fit together beautifully everything was just crystal clear and I really really appreciated that I think all of us did he really did a fabulous job not in making the class necessarily feel exciting minute-to-minute but in really putting across the material in a way that made it seem so easy we didn't even realize that we were learning pretty sophisticated stuff okay I have to stand up to tell you my thing it's a pleasure to be here I have to tell you I didn't know this existed before I was invited to be here and I'm sorry because I think it's great no I think it is a wonderful commentary on the richness of the offerings at MIT and how hidden they are often from you know people who might be really engaged in them so I'm delighted that I know this and you know henceforth will make an effort to come you know my teacher that I want to pay tribute to is Barry Fabian who was my professor of biology at Vitz University in Johannesburg where I got my first two degrees that is in South Africa and South Africa when I was growing up was a very in-the-box kind of place educationally you it still is to some extent but at the time you know there was rote memorization okay and I was good at it but that was how we learned there was not much room for thinking creatively but the day I walked into Barry's class he stood at the board with young assistant professor he was going to tell us about developmental biology which ended up being my subject and he picked up his chalk and he said okay I'm going to tell you about what I'm going to tell you about let's just you know lay out the groundwork and he took his chalk and he drew a line across the board and then I have the disposition wrong he drew a line across the board and then there was a wall you know and he went on the wall with his chalk and he went all around the wall and he went across the closed door and he went up the passageway and there was a door at the back and he went out the door and he walked down and he came back and he went back on the wall whoops where was our board and he went back along the board and there we were okay well we were incredulous we were just stunned that a professor would you know to face the walls and go outside the bounds of the blackboard but it was an unbelievably important experience because it actually was opening up the box you know it was opening up the box of rote memorization that we were all in and saying that there were ways that you could go somewhere else that were interesting and they were allowed he gave us license to go somewhere else and you know that was I would say a transformative lecture and actually he was a very awesome individual who still is and now he is a dear friend of mine but that moment of being given license to think about whatever it was the line was emblematic of whatever it was to think about the line in a way that could go beyond the bounds of where you thought it was where you thought it was contained I would say that you know that was a transformation that I took with me forever and ever that's why it's a wonderful story I have an anecdote although it's a it's a reverse it's a it's a it's an anti-an anecdote it's a it's a it's a bad teacher anecdote when I was a sophomore in college I stumbled on to a course called European backgrounds of English literature of a European backgrounds of English literature and the first writer on the syllabus was Dostoevsky I'd never heard of him I read about 50 pages of crime and punishment and fell into a trance I'm sure there are other readers of Dostoevsky have had this experience you have to maybe be at the right age and I have a kind of literary energy in you but I was overwhelmed by this book I had never encountered a book that had the kind of energies that seemed to me to fall off every page and I was I became so obsessed by by Dostoevsky that not only did I read crime and I was taking my other courses too but I not only did I read crime and punishment and the other books on the syllabus but I read other Dostoevsky including the brothers Karamazov within a an incredibly short space of time too short even to remember what was going on in the book but it was one of those orgies of reading that one falls into and I wrote my term paper that only the second term paper I'd ever been required to write in college on dust on crime and punishment and I poured my soul into that paper it was a it was a religious experience to write about this writer who had mattered so who came to matter so much to me when I got the paper back from the professor it contained no marginal words although there were occasional vertical marks made in pencil in the margins and question marks two or three in the whole paper and at the end of the paper there was this comment of a grade a B plus and a comment not bad that was what I resolved to be a professor who would grade his students papers in a respectful way and I've tried to stick to that for 50 years I mention that example because I think in fact it's often the case that we one can be as discouraged and as damaged by bad teaching as one can be exalted by good teaching one of the things that's implicit in what in the anecdotes in the anecdotes we heard that I'd like us to sort of expand on a little bit more fully is is this Alan suggests that the teacher the teacher he identifies as having been valuable and important wasn't what was a person who had command of his material and whose mastery of the material was communicated to the students he even implied that this was not a professor who was very charismatic and exciting and passionate in the way that we normally think interesting teachers are so one model that suggested here is just the model of intellectual mastery at least at the level of of university education where the question of the teacher's ability to engage our us emotionally or to fascinate us because the teacher has some kind of charismatic energy seems not not relevant on the other hand Hazel's anecdote suggests a kind of charismatic teacher who wants to shock us into an awareness that we might not otherwise have and implies that the classroom can be a place of transformative surprise whereas Alan's model suggests it's a place where you of a creative learning now I don't mean we have to make a choice here but I'm curious about how each of you feel about these distinctions is and if you can say some more about them well I speak first I actually also admire charismatic teachers I shouldn't make it sound like I think the only thing a professor needs to do is to present the facts but in a subject like theoretical physics the presentation of the facts is extremely important and getting them clear and getting them all in a consistent notation with the signs right and everything is incredibly valuable and I should maybe add that professor Lars was not really a dull lecturer but but I think he was not particularly charismatic what was his particular strength was the incredible degree to which he was able to organize the material I certainly have had other teachers have been very charismatic and I admire those as well and try to extent that I can to be a little bit charismatic myself I think that's helping teaching but I at least in some subjects I think it's also incredibly important to really organize the material and intelligent way one one one one aspect of what you're saying is the question of the of the difference between a lecture class and a and a discussion class the Roberts example is the example of the teacher who interacts with individual students in ways that awakens them in some sense does it mean does this mean that lecture courses that the hostility that so many people feel toward lecture courses is really justified or that lecture courses are only appropriate for really advanced level students what do you guys have feelings about that occurs to me that they're too they're very similar they both refer to a larger context in your case temporal that your judgment of the teaching you said that while it was happening it was okay then retrospectively over the years the combination of clarity and complexity is what made it impressive and similarly Hazel said in the context of an extremely rigid memorization based institutional structure in that context again over time so that in both cases there's an historical aspect to it and good teaching is in this way very different from good performance in fact the knockout class where this is what a great class may not be effective teaching at all because there's a larger temporal context or a larger institutional context and just simply making a hit is not the point of teaching though it is done well I have to confess that I mean one of my anxieties all my career as a teacher has been that I know I can fool my students I say I know I can make them feel that they've had an exciting experience even if they haven't and I think that I think that some gifted teachers maybe many have this problem I just say I mean it's easy to seem to mesmerize them if you if you have a kind of theatrical character and I think many good teachers do have a kind of actorly dimension to their work but that's not the same as being a good teacher and I wonder whether you've had that same experience well you know I think it's a very this is a very complex question isn't it you know I think there's some balance between the scholarship that one has to communicate in the lecture and the storytelling aspect which is the engaging part of the lecture and I think the balance shifts from the introductory courses up to the graduate courses you know I teach introductory biology and I really view my role there as the erudite storyteller who can capture you know my large class who can you know there's lots of aspects to this but who can capture the large class and tell something which is compelling and you know if oversimplified largely accurate and that's kind of the hook because for a lot of these students they are not going to get more educated in biology as they go through the Institute so they need to listen and they need to be there and you know I'm the best person within the course with my co-professor who can actually tell them the story of biology and I think I'm very aware of that at the introductory level that there's you know there's the information that has to be correct but there's the engagement that is really important now when I teach you know my graduate students the other semester I think the balance really shifts to scholarship and I think there what is telling a story but actually it's the scholarship it's the thread of being able to synthesize the material and give it to students so that they really notch up in their way of thinking about a topic and in their understanding of the topic and of course you know there's a nice sort of collegial interaction the classes are smaller but the dynamic is so different than the introductory courses so I think your the answer to your question is a sort of it depends you know but you would be a defender of lecture courses I love lecture courses I think we don't I love I love lecturing I love you know the opportunity to have 300 parallel conversations with each of my students I kind of view lecture as an opportunity to have this you know multi conversation I love seeing people who are listening I love it when the class goes really quiet and you know that everyone really is listening and you know yeah I think it's a we it's an opportunity to build a community that goes beyond the lecture material that actually you know goes into the whole experience of being part of the MIT community and of the particular class so I think lecture serves much more at the introductory levels especially than just communicating the information I think as you as I said I think as time goes on and students become more mature the scholarship really kind of trumps the community aspect but I think lecture always has the opportunity for building community and I think building community amongst groups is always a terrific thing one of the implications of our conversation so far at least it seems to me an implication is that there may be a difference or perhaps there's a difference between the demands of a humanities classroom or a social science classroom and a science and a science classroom and I'm wondering Robert and I can sort of defend the humanities and you guys can defend the sciences do you think there's a difference do you in your practice do you believe there's a difference I think I have a hard time knowing how to answer that question because I've never taught a humanities class I haven't even been to humanities class and many many many years my guess is that there are differences but maybe I would say that I expect that there's more commonalities than differences certainly in both cases one does need to engage the class and I was I really like what what Hazel just said about lectures I'm also a big enthusiast of lectures and to me a lecture really is a interaction between a speaker and an audience I don't think lecture is anything like somebody getting up in front of the audience like a movie and just saying things you're always looking at the people reacting to their facial expressions even though they're not asking questions and I think there's a very strong element of responsiveness on the part of the lecture to the audience that's very real and create something that really can't happen any other way and I would guess that's true one kind of argument that they I mean I'm on your side of course I mean I love lecturing I would die if I couldn't lecture but I the one complaint that they make of that it's very common about lectures is that there's something kind of that the absence of interaction is what is what people complain about why should students sit passively and listen to an expert especially now in the in an age when they can do do some kind of digital search and find something online or in which they can simply read the material what justifies gathering a hundred or 200 students in one space and have an expert talk to them instead of just hand them a text. Hazel gave a very good anticipatory response to that by saying she was 300 separate conversations parallel with her students and that when the room falls silent you know they're paying attention and adequate lecturing good lecturing is interactive you you're sensing when the students you're following facial expressions you hear a lot of coughing or less coughing so forth I can remember lecturing Shakespeare for non-majors at Berkeley and I've never taken a Shakespeare course just my bright ideas about Shakespeare and in Berkeley you know dogs would wander in and out of the classroom there were people from Telegraph Avenue who had come in to relax indoors for a while and it had it was like your word communal extending into the yeah and there are times when you could feel at every moment you can feel a kind of graph tension and in those and those I always would include myself but always stop after 10 or 15 or 20 minutes and invite remarks maybe the question is too difficult or too vague but I hope that you and the audience will consider it too and maybe we can come back to it when we come to the audience participation in your management yes yeah but that's the topic I want us to sort of come back to as well but yes of course I may be sentimental about science when you said that it occurred to me that I chose a classroom that was teaching a technical subject if not precisely scientific a little bit more of an engineering subject and I realized the last time I talked to the extremely ambitious verb and BU has a very small MFA program and thanks to a donor every year eight of the BU poets get global fellowships they go away to for up to two months choose any non-English speaking country theory is it's very good for writer particularly an American writer to experience a different culture these used to be competitive fortunately or unfortunately we now have enough money where everybody gets one who wants one and I had looked at the proposals and I said to this small group of students I'm not scolding you it may seem I'm scolding you I don't think we have been exacting enough and asking you to describe these proposals you're not tourists you're not there to say I had a great time in Romania or somewhere and I read as you said that I remember that I said to them it's as if you're a scientist you're doing marine biology somewhere what are the books what's the bibliography what are the issues what be a scientist about this I said to this group of poets so and I as I said prophecy never mark or close in a way I'm sentimental about science when there are conversations about if you show a certain film or read a certain book do you have to give people this I think the controversy is fading a bit about what do they call them my trigger words and must trigger warning trigger warning and I I have said to classes this is like being a scientist if this exists and you want to study it you have to deal with it it's part of what the materials this is data and you can't ignore it so it I hope these aren't just figures of speech I think it's actual respect for knowledge which applies to my example of good teaching he wanted us to know something can I make a comment about lecture you know that so interested to hear what you all think there's so many like Vicka fellow sitting out there I don't know I you know we should all be around a table rather than you know us and yes you know but I think you know I tell my advisees you know there's two things that will get them through a course they go to lecture and they do the problem sets and they'll pass you know and I think that that is largely true and what is it about going to lecture you know and there I think we're very into science of learning and you know education science and so on but you know there is a cognitive reason for that I think if material goes in through the eyes and it goes in through the ears and it goes in by handwriting then there's some neural circuits that get engaged and there's something the students sitting there at least has heard of it you know it's on a piece of paper at least has heard of it and then that can be short up with other mechanisms I think you know you just don't engage like that when you watch a video when you read a book it's this kind of you know three-way entry that I think is not substitutable and I think unless people are actually sitting together in a room they're not fully engaged because you know you're watching it on the web even if you're taking notes at the same time you know you quickly just check the news or the weather and then come back to the lecture so I think there's something actually that's very deep you know that's a cognitive neuroscience reason that there are lectures and that lectures are really valuable and of course they're different levels of interesting and not interesting lectures but I think that reason is a really solid reason and unless humans you know evolve I don't see that reason going away and the value of lectures going away as I don't play the experience of the audience being part of an audience that the feeling or sensing the other people around you is part of the benefit of it. Oh I think that's a really interesting question I think so I think it's you know it's the community thing you know and I think a lecture is such a living experience you know all of a sudden on you know whatever whenever Valentine's Day was or the day before I was in the middle of my lecture and of course the logs burst in to serenade someone and I immediately threw them out because I just needed all the time you know but that was a kind of that was a participatory thing you know everyone was in it and they applauded my you know throwing out the logs after I done it you know and we had a really good rapport for the rest of the lecture you know so I think there's sort of the incidental experience you know or the professor writes something incorrect on the board that's always a bonding experience for the class when the professor has to correct herself so I think yeah there's this kind of you know this real time real people who are you sitting next to you know and so on that it makes it a real an experience you know when you know you're alive there it's it's actually a real living experience yeah I would add the analogy between theater and lecture is real you know what might have thought that live theater would disappear when movies reached a certain quality and you could have color and now even three-dimensional movies but despite many many years of excellent movies live theaters is a well and going strong and probably there are more live theater productions per year now than ever in the past and it doesn't seem to be dying anytime soon I think there really is something about the live experience that excites people and I think it's almost as true for academic lectures as it is for theater performances there's no question I think that the sort of existential energy that exists in a live classroom is a critical element in teaching but the question of course is whether or not the sort of information that's presented in a lecture really couldn't be presented just as concisely in in prose why is it that is it is it a failure on the students part that they can't they just don't have the energy but they're there it's it makes it easier for them to absorb the information it's a complicated issue but I had one other observation about lecturing I'm not sure there's I don't know enough about science teaching to be sure but I have the sense that what I do when I lecture in a literature course or in the film course involves something more than presenting information I I mean I try to be as rigorous and exact and as fact-filled as I can be in the lecture and I spend a lot of time organizing how I want to present it and the information that I want to give them but I but I what I but I never write my lectures out and and this is I'm copying the best lecture I ever studied with when I was an undergraduate who I found really inspired me what I try to do when I lecture and I think a lot of the people that have meant the most to me as teachers have done this I think what I'm also doing for the students is modeling thinking that is to say because I don't write it out even though I know the stuff backwards and forward and if I didn't know the material very well I don't think I would be effective but because I know the material so well it seems to the students as if I'm actually sort of struggling to figure out what I want to say all I'm actually doing is trying to sort of we know all the facts I have and sort of decide what emphasis I want to put on the conversation at this moment but the effect of it is to create it and I is to at least create a kind of drama in which they can see the professor struggling to figure something out or working on articulating something clearly and I have come to think that that's the essence of why my lectures matter to the students not because the information I give them they could get from a book but the but the way I organize the material the way I put the material together and especially the way I model the process of synthesizing the material is I think what is special about the lecture I'm not sure but that's how I have come to feel about it I'm not sure whether this makes sense to the rest of you but or whether it would work in science because I mean there is sort of basic information you need to tell me and I don't know whether you need to model how you think about the theory of relativity you just tell them what the theory of relativity is it's not exact and it was it seems to me if we're talking about an interpretive enterprise like teaching you let like humanity is teaching this may be the kind of model I'm talking about maybe more compelling but nonetheless and it can't be completely true that there's a difference because a science lecture is still engaged in the same act of synthesizing and organizing that I've described here and it would seem to me it would have something of the same consequence but I'm not certain about it you know I think I'd go back to my point that at the introductory level and at the more advanced level the strategy of teaching really changes you know my introductory lectures are carefully orchestrated I have written out everything that I'm going to put on each of my 12 black boards and I've written the time at which I am going to complete what is on each and you know I really try to follow that and I try to put kind of fun things in my lectures you know I teach in 10-minute increments we have a stretch halfway through I take myself to the back of the room we have a little quiz you know there's stuff right we have a good time for our 50 minutes together but it's really carefully orchestrated at the graduate level that's much less true it's really much more discursive and I go in and start talking about something and I'm armed with lots of material and literature and so on but there really are honest questions that I would like to engage with the students on and then it really is a question I don't know what they're going to give me the answers for sometimes I do sometimes I know some of the answers and some of them their times are a complete surprise which is really fantastic and then it's much more you know what you alluded to there's kind of a process by which the material is synthesized as it's delivered I don't think that works at the introductory level where you know there's a lot of students and there's not much time and there's material that one has to get through so that they can go on to their problem set which is due at the end of the week you know well one thing we've been talking about without confronting it directly is the is the digital revolution is what what the implicate and all of all of the folks here in all of the panelists here have digital projects of various kinds Robert has an edX course in the art of poetry that is about to be published second iteration we did it last year and the second iteration begins March 24th so I've already done it and both of you have digital projects that you might briefly mention that would be helpful for people to know about well my favorite course to teach is a course called the early universe which is what I work on and that is now available in OCW with videos and so on it's not a MOOC but the lectures and problem sets are all available I have a lot of digital projects in the works though one of them is called pre-701 getting up to speed and biologies for the students the 15% of students who really can't handle introductory biology because MIT introductory biology is kind of at a high level so I started a new course of IAP which is bringing people up to speed and that's my taught and developed the material and it's going to go on to MIT X over the summer and then I have another project called frontiers of development which is a synthesis of all of the wonderful scholars who teach developmental biology here at MIT and really it's I'm going to be a very modular course where people will be able to pick and choose what they want to know about development whether they're cancer biologists or introductory students or CEOs of companies who want to kind of know what's going on in the field so that's fun and then I have a whole project to develop recitation problems that are going to be up on MIT X when they're developed but I'm going to use this electronic thing to have another thought that came to me I never thought of it before about lectures maybe an advantage of the lecture compared to the textbook is that it's an important aspect of teaching we haven't mentioned which that it's exigent it exacts things from the students you can't read at your own pace the lecture has its own rhythm and you must exercise your ability to absorb to take notes to reflect good lectures sometimes say this is very important so don't write it down don't write this down because it matters and there's that rhythm of what is merely being absorbed for later reflection what is to be attended to right away that demands a lot of the students I left that out of my description of my Monday talk with these global fellows I said I'm not scolding you and I said to them meaning it we let you down we the creative writing program did not provide you with an exacting set of requirements for these proposals even though the proposals you will get the money for with you whatever we think we should have begun the conversation by saying you must have a definition you must have a set of people or books that you're gonna do and a strength of the lecture that I miss in the MOOC I'm proud of the MOOC but the MOOC doesn't happen it's a real time for each separate student separately and in that audience or that assembly that community for the lecture you know you're doing the exercising together you're trying to get somewhere in that 50 minutes or here's one question that occurred to me as you were speaking about your digital projects it seems as if the digital projects you described would not contain the existential energies you were praising in the classroom do you think that's true and that does that mean that we think that you actually think digital education is therefore limited that it will really never replace ordinary lectures you know I think that's an interesting question I'm not a actually I really dislike the flipped classroom notion I think it's really bothers me the flipped classroom yeah it's a concept that I really dislike so I think you know like you know my digital projects are ones that sort of augment the actual in-person projects and rather than replace them or something completely different the developmental biology course I'm putting together frontiers of development is like nothing that exists at MIT it's kind of a synthesis of bits of scholarship that I think will come together in a really novel way and so that it's different it's just different there is no lecture course that it is supplanting and you know it's a it's therefore in my opinion a worthwhile kind of process I you know I think there are places where excellent lectures that are digital are really helpful for students and really give students the opportunity to see lecturers of the highest caliber present their material in the highest way but I don't think MIT is that place I think at MIT we can present to our students in person the material and that that is part of the privilege of being an MIT student and the experience of being an MIT student I think digital material is very interesting there's all sorts of stuff that I've been playing with that I think really can help students learn in ways that are more fun that are more effective but I don't see you know changing lectures to digital I'm not here not at MIT the final topic that I want our panel to discuss before we open it up to the audience I hope you're all thinking about ways of arguing and concretizing what we've been saying is the broad topic is what I call the politics of teaching and I don't mean ideologically the politics in that sense what I mean is the constant argument and and anxiety that surrounds the question of whether or not teaching is truly an activity that is respected and rewarded in you in especially in advanced universities in elite institutions one of the oddities about our profession is that it's one of the very few professions in which the reward structure is such that as you become more well-known and more successful you're asked to do your job less because right because the stronger the teacher the more elite the institution the lighter the teaching load that seems contradictory in some ways to me and more generally what I'd like us to at least briefly to make some comments on and talk about a bit before we open it up for general discussion is though is the kind of argument that some that we often hear from the mouths of parents which is yeah you guys are very well paid and you teach such a tiny number of tiny number of classes and my student might my son or daughter needs a lot of attention and here you are cramming them into big lecture courses if you taught a little bit more if you if your workload was closer to the workload of this of the civilian population you you would you would be doing the country a favor how do how does one respond to that kind of to that kind of complaint I mean I I want to admit that I mean I feel that there's some justice in the complaint there is there is a sense in which although and of course it varies from institution to institution but there's a sense in which very powerful and gifted teachers who are perhaps not productive as scholars are certainly not bound for success in the elite institutions and that may not be so serious if the people who were promoted were good teachers but the adverse is also sometimes the case that a person who's not a very good teacher but is brilliant or apparently very successful researcher will be retained by so one of the things I want us to at least meditate on a little bit is this recurring complaint not only that amateurs and civilians make about the academy but that those of us inside the academy often feel as well and I'm just wondering if you have feelings about this if you think the charge is reasonable or unfair if you think it's a good thing that the more successful a researcher is the less that person has to teach that kind of question I could comment I have a lot of opinions you know I think in a great research universities it's really a major currency for promotion which is research prowess and I think for promotion to tenure that that is how a great research university stays great and I think that is why our major currency for promotion to tenure is research prowess I think however I think after tenure one is able to take full advantage of the freedoms that being in the Academy of Forge and that is really an extraordinary opportunity I am writing for the faculty newsletter an article called the job of professor because you know we have such a complex job here as professors but if you look at the job descriptions in the advertisements for our junior faculty there is really it's really you know we're searching for someone you know in cosmology or in cancer research who has an interest in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level and that's it you know that is what our job descriptions are but in fact as one goes through the ranks you realize that the job of professor is extremely complex that there's teaching and mentoring and governance and all sorts of things that whatever you can dream of you have the freedom to do and so I think there's a balance at the junior level where promotion really has to be about research I think there are awards for research throughout one's career which are appropriate because this is a research university but I think as people go on in their careers there really is the freedom to think about where to put effort and education is one of those places and of course education is more than just teaching there's there's so much of it there that being said I think we do not teach our faculty to be professors we don't teach people at the faculty level how to teach I'm seeing Daniel there we've had a discussion about you know maybe doing something there I'm looking at Haynes who has played a major role on OCW in putting together you know programs that are about how we teach I think we don't do a good job in fact we don't do any job at all in teaching faculty how to teach and we don't you know teach faculty to do all those other things like manage businesses and you know manage people and all the other things that you have to do so I think that but but I think that the currency of promotion that we have right now is okay and what we really you know need to make sure is that as faculty move up through the ranks the freedom to go and focus on education or on other aspects of the professorship is supported and is respected comment tell them yeah I guess I'd like to say that speaking for the Department of Physics which is where I'm at and don't know that much about the details of what happens in other departments but in the physics department for at least the last 10 maybe 20 years teaching really has played a significant role in tenure decisions for example or promotions in general it's true that you cannot get a tenured position in the physics department so teaching alone you need a solid research record and I think it's also true that with a really fantastic research record you'd probably get tenure even if you were a lousy teacher but nonetheless the common case is a research case which is incredibly strong but which still could go either way because judging research is a very subjective thing and in those cases teaching has played I think a pretty significant role in decisions of who has gotten tenure in physics and who has not and I think most of our young faculty really are incredibly good teachers so I think there's at least a shift of emphasis in that direction at least within the physics department which I think I think is very healthy I should also add that I think the basic emphasis on research is real I don't think it should be placed by an emphasis on teaching I think what makes MIT a great educational institution is that we have such experts in all fields that's really what the students are coming here for in the first place so I think we're right to emphasize research but to also give significant credence to teaching and I think maybe that is actually what's being done Robert I feel like this is an extremely large and important this sociopolitical nature of teaching I wish I knew more about the subject but it's a very very powerful subject apparently and I wish I did have the statistics but it may be more than half of the educational courses the student per course are taught in community colleges in this country increasingly adjuncts and graduate students teach courses the admission system at most elite places maybe at MIT less than others is profoundly corrupt in its history it began in the 20th century with its roots mainly in anti-Semitism this whole thing of the well-rounded person and geographical distribution it was all designed to keep Jews out of Princeton and Yale and Harvard there's this book called the chosen that documents that if we want to have a country in which can we continue to have the vitality of previous generations in relation to education teaching in community colleges and in the whole spectrum we have to start paying attention to it in a way that we're failing to tremendously and we are living in a kind of with our institutional life we are living a little bit in a kind of la la land we are not in contact with the most important issues to do with our profession and the future of our profession where the bright people will come from if we leave it simply to social factors and to the socionomic activity of the admissions office all do respect to the admissions office we decay as a society so the socio-political questions about teaching are larger and much more important than I can deal with I'm embarrassed that I don't know more about them but I am aware of them and as a transition to the MOOC as I said I'm proud of my MOOC I've been struck by how much educational governance people provosts and presidents and deans are extremely interested in my MOOC more than in most other things I do and I'm afraid it may have to do with what you alluded to with this idea that somehow we have a wonderful new technological alternative to the way we've been doing this and especially we can give it to the masses it will solve social problems and inequities I that's disturbing to me not just that it can save us a lot of money we can fire all our money we can have a pin we can have we can have a pin ski DVD that will be the poetry education for all the community colleges I I the most I'll talk about two I'll talk about a couple of defects I found with the MOOC and it was a very successful the only BU edX MOOC that had more resisted attrition veteran at higher enrollment was the baseball sabre metrics so unexpectedly poetry and as again I made uneasy by the congratulations I get for this and it's based on videos that MIT helped me make I recommend it to everyone favorite poem dot org favorite poem dot org you'll see a construction worker reading Whitman talking very cogently about Whitman you'll see a wonderful photography student talk about a Sylvia play he's a Jamaican guy and the Sylvia Plath poem speaks to him you'll see a Cambodian-American high school student in San Jose read a Langston Hughes poem and those are very short they have the virtue of being three to five minutes and they are one element in the course I added five to twelve minute mini lectures and then we had discussion groups and the discussion groups included a poetry teacher the guy who does the garden at my condo a high school student again a range of professions and ages about ten minutes each and when we finished the MOOC the edX people and the BU people were very interested on the next iteration of the MOOC I found myself much less so I'm glad to do it but my great concern I described it to them as the trough I wanted this to be a bit like a book or a library can we not make a website where there's just a list of these things just describe the ten minute lectures and describe the they're edited down to ten of the discussions and just have them where the person with intellectual curiosity is though in a public library can just go through the trough none of the structure of a course it's not a course it's a set of resources it's a digital it's a it's a book in the cloud whatever you want to call it and I was I felt that these materials we had assembled arranging them in a course was all too soothing or all too attractive if you want to substitute this for courses and I was more interested in them as materials than those courses so I'm happy to do it as a course it sounds as if you made an anthology rather than a systematic course well we made a systematic course and in some ways the thing that interests me most was the anthology of discussions lectures prose all of that together incidentally about the technological subject science subjects and discussion subjects the edX platform we had discussion pods this may have to do they say it's going to be better they hadn't done that many humanities courses our discussions collapsed the edX software it crashed it couldn't deal with all the many many people who had a lot of yacking they wanted to do about poems they had not run into this and I had my graduate student slaves were having dialogue with these people and edX couldn't handle it I just I'm really interested to hear I'm chair of the MITx faculty advisory committee I'm there as kind of Joe faculty member who knows who does not program you know but can represent and with the wonderful committee you know represent the interests of the faculty and actually we're just talking today about the limitations of the MITx edX platform and reaching out to get feedback on those limitations and then trying to address them so you know your experience is an awesome one to document somebody told me we had a meeting with the edX people I was merciless ah good great they were so nice about it somebody explained to me afterwards programmers love complaints they're delighted to hear the thing was a mess it's like a game for them right well I let me ask the audience to sort of concentrate your minds for for our comments and questions but I want to I have a sort of transition anecdote nothing nothing fancy or or profound but moving I think when I was thinking about our session and talking about the significance of value of college teaching I I happened upon a little squib in the Times literary supplement of December 4th and it told us it talked about the great literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin about whom who was a very honored figure as you most of you know internationally for his for his theoretical and and and historical work but in the city of Saransk Russia where he lived as as the TLS said in obscurity between 1946 and 1969 I'm quoting here a former political exile and chain smoking amputee Bakhtin is remembered most of all as a teacher gesticulating at quote gesticulating passionately Mikhail Mikhailovich would sometimes knock his crutches to the floor but neither he nor his audience would notice Mikhail Glebouchin reminisced in Roskaya Gazeta last week sometimes we would carry him upstairs in our arms he would lecture without notes quoting not just poems but vast chunks of prose word for word the statue that they installed marks the 120th anniversary of Bakhtin's death and this image of Bakhtin surrounded by his beloved students waving his arms being carried up the stairs oblivious to his own debility seems to me and resonates with me in ways I can't even fully articulate and something important about teaching is told in that anecdote well questions comments additions attacks from the audience please let's let's hear it from our from our fellow colleague from our colleagues from our fellow from our fellow teachers Arthur because I remember the discussion will be mostly about lecturers or four lectures in front of us but I was most struck by Robert Pinsky's comments introductory comments about his a teacher or a mechanical engineer a mechanical drawing teacher obviously that was straight out of play though it was a platonic dialogue and I guess my question is have the four of you ever dreamt of doing something similar yourself and because it's the absolute antithesis of the lecture I knew it that way so this is it's totally different but it's a totally different experience for both the teacher and the student as the evidence indicates it's what you came up with for example have you ever repeated it yourself tried to do something similar with a small group of students very often I don't have a super I I hope I have an intuitively organized mind but I've always been a terrible note taker I don't know how to make outlines I couldn't possibly plan a lecture and after so many minutes this happens I need to improvise I'm made nervous by preparation and if I didn't feel I could occasionally go into the mode of encouraging students to ask me considered questions I couldn't do this profession I couldn't function it so the Mac with the example is to some extent autobiographical I don't want to want that I am as effective as he was in that occasion but I rely on it if all I could I approve of the model of I think it's much more line the model of just pouring information into students lot to be said for it it's really what we're doing is we're gonna die we can try to pour it into them so they can pour it to somebody else before they die I don't I'm not sentimental you know I'm saying we mustn't do that I personally can only function by having them draw something out of me as on this occasion I couldn't have prepared anything I've said I rely on David Allen and Hazel will say something you just said something then I get energized but I I think for some of us by which I mean me that's the only way sir hi I'm Charles Lyserson also make Vicar fellow which there seem to be one or two of us around here from computer science and little disappointed not to have some engineering representation on the panel but that's that's okay I'll have my say you know when I looked at the announcement for this the first line was what separates a good teacher from a great one and I think a lot of you from my point of view you've danced around that question rather than actually addressing it we heard a lot about wonderful techniques but we didn't get to understand you know for Hazel or for Robert or any of these other things why these people were using these techniques and I think that the answer is is love and the answer is the reason you're doing this is because you love your audience your students otherwise why are you doing this okay what is it and I think Robert the comment you just made about giving something of yourself to them that's all about love and what I have found is the most important thing in teaching is that you actually love your students because then it dictates all the things you need to do in terms of technique okay because then you prepare for your students because you love them okay the difference of the different formats digital or whatever a lot of that is it is easier to love somebody when they are in your arms okay it is easier to love them when they are in the room reacting to you I've written a very popular textbook in computer science and that was a lot harder than lecturing okay why well because the person that I'm trying to love isn't there I have to sort of imagine the person who's there rather than having them there and I think until we understand that that teaching and learning is all based on emotion and in particular on this loving relationship you know we're gonna do this you know you know what does MCAS or no child left behind have to do with love nothing that's why those aren't successful programs until we understand that kind of thing whether it's K through 12 or graduate the reason that I think that research is so important is because you love your research and if you don't have somebody you know you get tenure because you demonstrate you really love that stuff and because we're human we really want to share our love of things with people we love okay and and so I think until people understand whether it be at an engineering school or at you know humanities or whatever that that's the foundation of good teaching I don't think we make much progress in this country towards the enormous educational problems that we have to solve I have one thing to add I agree with everything you said but I would add that it's love also toward and having to receive from your predecessors the deceased that you remember personally but also I'm the servant of Emily Dickinson and of the past and one feels a quasi filial loyalty to the dead to the past and for me it has a lot to do with mortality then you have a quasi parental relationship with the ones younger than you I think I would resist love as the explanation even though I think I'm I think I understand your point but I would be much more comfortable reformulating and partly because I I've been doing this for 50 years it'd be very promiscuous of me to have had so many love affairs but more seriously I I mean I understand what you're saying but I guess in my own case what I think of is I think I have and I know other teachers I think Alan has this just from having had conversations with him and I know Robert has this impulse although it's he's become more imperial as he's become more famous more famous but but I think that I have an explainer Jane in this I when I know something I want everybody else to know it it's not in fact not everybody has this impulse and I think that one way to think about what a teacher is as as to distinguish a teacher from other kinds of authority figures is to say that one of the really wonderful things about it maybe this is a variation on your love principle is that the authority of the teacher is an authority the teacher wants to give away whereas most authority figures want to hold on to their authority they don't want to share it but what the the secret of what a teacher does is he wants to ideally the secret the teacher wants the intellectual authority that she has to be the property of the student this wants to give it away wants the student to have it and that may be a more elaborate way of saying that some what I often feel that I'm burdened with an understanding that doesn't really become satisfying to me until other people have it themselves now and I know this is not universal in people but I think it's a very common impulse in real in teachers I think teachers have some desire to let other people know what they've learned is their excitement about the value of what they know is democratic now I don't know that's exactly what you were saying but I think there's a connection I could comment you know I think this question of what's a good teacher and a great teacher is easily stated but I think the answer is really complex because I think there are different kinds of good teachers and there are different kinds of great teachers and you know I would be hard-pressed to say these attributes make a great teacher you know you've defined how it works for you and you know that resonates with me some but I really look around at my colleagues and I think there are different ways of presenting to a group that really you know make me say wow it's really good or make me say okay fine you know for me it's it's the connection if I feel like I'm actually speaking to my 300 students as individuals then I feel like you know I've done it and for me the greatest compliment in the course evaluations is if a student says you know professor serve made me feel like I was the only person in 26 100 then I know I've kind of got there you know we've made a connection even amidst this really large group of students but I do think it's a complex question and it's got a complex answer I'm Arthur Barr in the literature faculty and to the point to the question of good versus great teachers one way that I that that occurred to me to think about that when I saw the poster for this event it was to think about teaching as job versus teaching as vocation as something one feels called to do rather than simply the job that one has which one may like very much but is a job that one wouldn't do if it weren't one's job and I I know speaking for myself personally that I'm being a scholar and being the researcher that that hazelite inhabiting the role that hazel identified as the correctly as the the prime mover of promotion decisions at this Institute being a scholar is my job I'm good enough at it to have gotten tenure but it's not my vocation it's not why I wanted to become a professor and being a teacher is why I wanted to become a professor when you first articulated this I thought it was brave of you when I feel it now too I I think I'm the same but it's it's tough to confess well it you know there it is the kind of it is perversely the kind of thing one can say only after having received tenure in fact I mean that I mean I mean that quite literally and I think but I think more of us need who feel that way and this is not to say and my point is not that sort of teachers are noble in precise and inverse proportion to the extent to which scholars are smart right it's this is about getting rid of that kind of value judgment but I think that will only happen if more of us who do feel that way come out of the closet yes use the mic hi I'm Mark Hessler I'm an alum from once upon a time and I've been experienced quite a bit of the teaching from people I've heard from here so that's neat I was a high school English teacher and science teacher so I'm tempted to comment on that difference but I also just want to say about love I went to ed school once upon a time and one of the things that I learned there about teaching was that unlike other close relationships it's designed for termination the goal of the relationship is that it ends and that it ends well and so I think part of doing it well and the teachers who are very good at it bear very firmly in mind that that last day and what they want their students to walk away with so I think the the passing of the torch is very important computer science is much newer so you're not worried about people 300 years ago and and their legacy but indeed in literature that might be an important part of your personal sense of mission passing a torch on because in the end it's the job of the young to kick the old off the planet as I said and so we have this chance as teachers to pass something on now it's very I think it is very different with the new and exciting fields of our digital the madness we're living through and the new you know the new opportunities that exist computer science is right in the middle of that so it is a little bit different but ultimately that I think the issue with love is that it's a very tough kind of love that bears in mind that the last day is coming every day there's a very long history passing down the mathematics and so forth I wouldn't say and even you know out in touring people are relatively recent goes back to church to girdle to you know and you know Russell and then take it back into the Greeks and so forth and I think I have the same tradition you did when I do think passing the torch is a big piece of that you know it's when you put it that way computer science built on that I had a little bit of experience teaching math and something that I didn't expect to feel which I felt doing it was how incredibly venerable it was students famously don't like math at the high school level but I had this feeling that I was passing on something ancient and that the curriculum couldn't really be argued with you know any literature teacher might choose to teach a book and the kids can argue oh why do we have to read that and the teacher has to be very clever and creative to convince the kids that it's a good idea to read it but with math there's really very little argument they can make you know it's but this is this is how it's been done for 2,500 years the Pythagorean theorem and and they they're forced to respect it so there's an authority behind math teaching and I suppose computer science that doesn't exist for humanities humanity teachers have to create their own authority and I think David that's where the passion comes in okay I'm talking more than I meant to but I'll say one more thing the the about the science versus humanities one difference at the high school level is that kids have a great deal of experience being people and living so they're kind of prepared to be like grad students and in terms of the teacher can interact with them as very mature people and can trust that the students have a lot of experience with life and with if it's an English class they've read a lot already even if they don't read much but in particular they have a lot of experience being human so in humanities they're already kind of experts by the time you have them in high school or as undergraduates whereas in biology I imagine if it's you know you're talking about pre-701 a student who hasn't a student at 17 or 18 or 20 is not yet really steeped in biology and is not an expert so I think that's why the teaching a freshman English class could be like teaching a graduate seminar and that in terms of that difference that you're dealing with experts at being human whereas you're not dealing with experts in biology at that age so I think that's a really big difference and all the strategies change and maybe they become more like the graduate strategies I had other things to say but I'll stop thank you mark yes this is Stephen taps down I teach it against the table my students are for the most part smarter than I am they're just more flexible in their ability to use what they know I think I know more and over time when develops competence and but you guys have me thinking Hazel's emphasis on permission to think outside the box and and Roberts worked on MOOCs and David's brave acknowledgement about his suspicion of his own charm as a lecture you guys have me thinking about a moment in Dante I'm really sorry Alan but about halfway through that down the Inferno and it's deep down on Dante puts his teacher Brunetto Latini on he locates him as a maybe a sodomite maybe an invert maybe introverted right but they they dance in a circle facing each other and and they're they rain of fire falls on them and I've always wondered why does Dante do that there's no contemporary evidence that Latini was so my question is he's his beloved teacher and mentor and he greets him affectionately so my question is either to the humanists why why does Dante do that if it's true that's a weird thing to do if it's not true it's an even weirder thing to do right it's either why does not they do that or is there something in there about the teacher student relationship and the need for the student room to surpass the teacher or get past the teacher or something even says even says if it were up to me Brunetto you would not be suffering like this which is like a very layered unpleasant joke because maybe we should he's writing this hold on a second Robert maybe look not everyone in the audience is up on Dante maybe we should be more explicit about this moment it is a very dramatic moment in the Inferno don't Steven said it right but let's repeat it Steven what Dante is meeting his favorite teacher his mentor and his mentor is deep in the it's being punished he's deep deep in hell he's in the lower circles of hell and Steven saying why is he there I thought the answer was fairly obvious that he had violated God's rule what Dante believed to be God's law by being homosexual but but and so that even though Dante feels great affection for him and benefited from this man God's laws are inflexible and that's why he has to be here but the more so that but that's but but it's been a crux those of you don't know the passage it's been a crux for years especially for teachers exactly because of the drama that Steven is talking about now tell us what it means Robert I think Steven was talking to something that I thought when Mark was speaking I recently read my wife is on the last chapter less faces of a book she's writing about psychoanalysis and a large part of the book is about they use the term termination as they do use the term love and that also that therapeutic relationship is also one it's a very close relationship whose purpose is to end they have that rather peculiar Latin term for it and I think what Steven is implying and he wasn't his teacher in any sense that's very similar to what we do at Yale or Amherst or at MIT it wasn't a classroom or he it was much more personal instruction but Dr. Ellen Pinsky in this very tech you know professional book she does use the term love and she does use also the term vengeance that the neutrality of the the book is called mortal gifts has to do with mortality and the fact that the therapist can die eventually will die and is mortal in the sense of imperfection is a function perhaps like teaching as she says could not be performed by a robot or an angel or Jonathan Swift win him it can own that therapeutic function can only be performed by someone who is mortal and I think what Steven is implying in the Dante passage is that in a quasi parental or quasi filial relationship there would be an element of rage and vengeance for the comment yes she proposes that yes one does in therapy I think one does in life as mr. Rogers used to say it's the very same people to make you angry make you glad and of course in teaching I agree with the that in a way you love the students and after the classes over you realize a particular student was pretty annoying person somebody didn't much like but while the class is happening you know you're you're you're in that role you're trying to give them what you got to hand it on and I would imagine there's psychic energy comes from that controlling or channeling that as with being a dad or a child you know if you're a parent or a child you have to know how to deal with the fact that you if you weren't so cute I would probably eat you yes sir so I'm Daniel Jackson from computer science this has been an incredibly inspiring and thought-provoking discussion and we've talked mostly about the role of teachers and I wonder if we could talk from in about the role of students and in particular think about learning it seems to me that one of the most important things about teaching is teaching our students how to learn and indeed I think that's one of the values of a lecture that it's simply a good skill to learn to be able to sit and listen to somebody talk and if we eliminate lectures from our curriculum then our students will never acquire that skill I think a lot about my own teaching failures and I also think about my students learning failures and to what extent I'm responsible for those but there is one moment of student failure that I'm most upset about and I think I am undoubtedly partially to blame for it but I also believe that our culture is to blame for it and I'd like to tell you what it is I very avidly note the number of students who turn up to my lectures as a sort of ongoing measure of whether I'm doing a good job or not and my students are normally in the main class I teach in their third or fourth year and they're pretty jaded already and they're very overworked and so it I have to admit it's a fight to get them to come to lecture and I sort of relish that fight but there is always one thing that I regard as a terrible failure which is there is one lecture that I cannot get them to come to and that is the lecture in which their colleagues their peers present their work and receive awards for it and I find this deeply upsetting and I do all kinds of games to try and make this lecture more exciting but I know why they don't come they don't come because there'll be nothing they'll be tested on there'll be nothing they'll be graded on it's a lecture it's actually the last lecture of the class and I don't have an all the normal little quiz games and stuff which create tiny little a tiny little incentives for them to come and I wonder you know I I think I as a computer scientist I should think about programming but I really think more about deprogramming and I wonder if we need to deprogram our students that they've developed such an instrumental notion of education and what it's about that they don't or they wouldn't say they don't have the sense of community that Hazel talked about but we have to fight against the culture we're in in order to in order to establish that notion of community and I personally feel that it's a big struggle and I don't know if I'm alone in this but if it's entirely due to my own fault as a teacher but I wonder if there's something we need to do as an institution to instill in our students the value of being being part of this community and playing their role as learners I think that's a profoundly important point and about the about how instrumental the students sometimes are the atmosphere encourages it there they have they're so over scheduled and so busy that they're often doing triage on their courses one form that that takes in the humanities for exams are not always necessarily the most appropriate way to measure what students do in the humanities but the problem is if you don't give them regular work some equivalent to exams and problem sets they don't treat their courses in our part of the institute with the same seriousness than rigor that they do the other side and there are all kinds of tricks you can play but I mean but and I feel guilty when I have to do it create a weekly assignment that keeps them working a kind of equivalent of that other tricks like that in small classes what I hope to do sometimes and it's a I try to use your trick of measuring their their their interest and as to judge whether I've been successful is I actually try to teach them without exams to get a set but although I make them perform in class and write short assignments and I try to estimate how engaged they are week by week and it's a man when I'm successful I can see they're doing the work in keeping up but when I'm not successful it's almost always because I have not scheduled regular exams that would make them do it I don't know what the solution is but it's an it's an issue that I've never resolved fully yes I teach in the writing program could you use the microphone you know it's only because we're recording this so it won't be heard otherwise thank you hi I'm Karen I teach in the writing program and I have some experience using peer review so I I teach courses in the biology department but as the writing instructor and I'm very interested in developing that and I'd be happy to share some ideas with you because peer review although it hasn't been my intention to to sort of institute it for that purpose particularly but I think the effect can be can be helpful for the problem that you mentioned which I guess we're we're all aware of you reminded me of the most discouraging depressing and doleful thing I've ever known about teaching years ago I taught at Wellesley college where they had a very elaborate student evaluation system and somebody you all could probably put this better than I did somebody took that data and excluded the good from the bad to the wonderful that they they tried to make the data reflect which category of course which category of course won the highest ratings from the Wellesley students by category do you mean what what department and what kind of course I see okay why why is this so depressing to you wait okay first year of a language because the lectures are closely related to the textbook and the examinations your grade is very precisely proportionate to the amount of time and energy you put into it it's the the contract for the grade is very clear and after you've mastered the material it is not required to think about it at all that last is very depressing for sure the whole thing is it's that that is where the contract is cleared so all the energy you put into being loved is it the customers or employees however you want to think of them and what you mean by instrumental is that's on the model of the larger society grades are their pay they're placed like Wellesley they're all tremendous grade inflation and they're all you know already passed a lot of hurdles but it's still the mentality they've been trained that way so they their pay level the the salary is very precisely related to work you put into and you don't have to do all this clumsy awkward thing of thinking and understanding and that is patently I think the explanation of why the most popular kind of course is the first year of a language and I try to keep that in the back of my mind at the front I can you know I that's a good story you know I think it's really interesting I think the question of coming to lecture is kind of part of the college experience question you know this is one of your freedoms right you come to college I have a lot of thoughts about the college experience and a lot of them are really just like aspects of of how our students view college but you know there's this tremendous freedom to decide what you're going to do and lecture is one of the places there's usually no obvious penalty for not going to and so that's especially true in the large lecture courses now you can use clicker technology to make sure you're there and you can get you know five percent of your grade if you actually click in I don't use clickers in my graduate class you know actually 25 percent of their grade is for showing up and you know if it's a small class if they're not there it's very glaring and I you know email them right after and ask where they were in a large class it's not true and I think it's kind of embedded in this notion of freedom you know I'll get through introductory biology even if I'm not there you know and it probably is going to be true because our students are super smart and it's probably true in many places so I think that there's actually you know a sociological underpinnings really to addressing why students go to lecture and don't go to lecture and it doesn't have everything to do with the quality of the lecture at all I will say a year ago we had a terrible semester of losing a couple of students and you know I have never had greater attendance in my class that semester because there really was a sense of the usefulness of the community and the support of the community and that was really quite striking to me that the you know room was full and we were you know so sad together but in a kind of regular semester which of course you know is far preferable yeah that's you know there's students who just don't come and you say you know you would be much easier if you did come to lecture but there they are they've got other stuff to do and exercising the freedom of not coming so I think it's quite interesting might just say that I've also been disappointed in some of my classes this past time I was teaching a freshman class 801l and I did kind of discover it took me a while to discover it I wasn't as alert as I should have been but I kind of did discover by end of the term that if I talked about anything that was not going to be on the exam they really tuned out they really didn't want to waste any time on that and I do find that very disappointing among more upper class students though I think things are much better in my upper class classes I don't think I've seen that very much and I've also spent a fair amount of time probably everybody else has to supervising research projects through the UROP program of our students right now I have three or four UROP students or at least students who are sort of doing something in parallel with UROP if it's not officially through UROP and they're great that they really do very rapidly become totally dedicated to the project and it's just delightful to work with students in that context yes hi so I'm Nicholas I'm actually a student here I like coming to these things because I get to ask older people kind of what's happened and and the question I have is how you how you've seen student expectations change over over kind of the past 20 30 years especially people who teach engineering subjects or computer science subjects because I really feel kind of sitting in the dorms and talking with people that students at MIT and especially in particular come to college to to to more be trained to learn kind of workplace skills to be able to code in Java to be able to solve an engineering problem or to build rockets to go to space and and so I'm wondering if you if if you felt any any shift in in teaching students whose perspectives have changed over the decades I think you good you have to start I mean I well I'll start let Alan think I'll let Alan think about his answer which will be much more weighty than mine I don't think that I don't think in the humanities that I've seen a tremendous change because people don't come to MIT with their primary choice to be studying literature or history or or anthropology there has been in my 40 years at MIT and 50 years as a as a full-time professor a decline in students writing skills they come into the institution less well less effective writers than they were half a century ago when I began and even in the I would say in the last 20 years at MIT I think I've noticed that the the the students are less effective prose writers than they were before I think we at MIT have have not done a good job in emphasizing the importance of communication skills and in some ways we've been evasive about it because we've been reluctant to do what seems to me sort of obvious which is to have some kind of equivalent of a freshman English course that has to be got through or or you could pass out of it if you passed an exam but otherwise we'd have to take it and that I think might solve some of our problems but but apart from that I've seen no real change in the students except perhaps that they have they seem to have less time and they seem from my angle at least much more motivated to sort of get to graduate school and and there's they become more utilitarian maybe than they had been but that's a marginal change my all my broadest experiences it's been unbelievably exhilarating life enhancing beyond anything I could have imagined to be around these these brilliant children for such a long time I mean I I I have tremendous admiration for these students okay I guess I'd like to start out by saying that although I've been here for 35 years on the faculty I guess if I do the subtraction I have a lot of trouble discerning trends I think all trends happen too adiabatically for me to really follow them that's my shortcoming I presume I just have a short memory so but I guess if I tried to discern any trends I think over the years that I've been here the student body has become more diverse in many ways more diverse ethnically racially and background and more diverse in their interests which is probably the main thing that affects teaching back when I first came here a fantastic fraction of the incoming students wanted to be physicists which I thought was great and now it's a vastly smaller fraction and now there are more people interested in biology and computer science and there really seem to be a lot of students interested in solving the problems of the world in various ways which I tremendously admire so when I talk to the students especially in a large course like 801L where they have all different backgrounds I'm very impressed by the wide range of interests at the same time I think it does mean that they have a somewhat less preparation for technical subjects like 801L and that that does show up as well oh no I think it's a good thing I think we really do have a fantastic group of students and besides the freshman I deal with I mentioned I deal with a number of Europe students who really are interested in going into physics and they're absolutely fantastic I've met some of the most fantastic people in that context so I love our students I think they're great and I feel very privileged to be teaching here you know our students are also they're great I think they worry you know there's so much worry about where they're going to get jobs and their parents are worried about where they're going to get jobs and they're so worried that they're going to get a B in 701 and that's the end of their lives you know and it's um I think we so seldom point out to our students that we have a 97% graduation rate here and actually they're all going to get their degrees and that you know actually there's probably a 0% unemployment rate from anyone with an MIT degree you know it's these really positives that I feel like are really crucial to communicate to our students and their parents and I can't remember you know if it was like that when I came here I think I was so worried about getting tenure actually I wasn't really worried about getting tenure but I was so worried about you know trying to set up a research group and do something meaningful I didn't pay attention so I have no idea if that's changed over the years at all but I do think you know there's this kind of undercurrent of worrying about employment that is it has increased I think that there's an anxiety level that's greater than it was that's right and I think you know it is really up to the faculty to kind of diffuse that because in fact it is not a valid worry for MIT students you know our students really go on and they all do well and they all do something useful and they all earn a living and they all you know pretty much do just fine so I think you know this kind of worry is something that we could do better at diffusing when we spoke when we speak to our students you know one quick anecdote about that about about 10 years into my time at MIT I chatted with some of the students in the lecture course I teach the film experience and found that they were full of anxiety that I hadn't understood I hadn't realized was there and I so I toward the end about two-thirds of the way through the term I gave a brief mini lecture at the start of the before I actually went into the substance of the course and essentially the the lecture was you know there's life after failure if you get an F in a course you survive if you take a term off and come back you survive if you if you both phone graduation by a year you survive and I was I was amazed by the outpouring of gratitude I got from the students and I've now institutionalized that lecture and every year about two-thirds of the way through the term I say this in my lecture it's the largest course I teach something between 50 and 80 students some and a good term and I think it's a helpful message for the students to get but every year one or another student comes up to me and says it would be much better if a professor of physics were saying this so I'm passing the torch to Alan okay I'll take up the challenge give me a text that'll make it easier I want to thank the audience and thank our panel