Richard Feynman on education in Brazil

Surely you jest. This IS about the movie Brazil, right?

Wow, I mean, just wow.

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

So there I was with the most stupid example I could think of and what was their reaction? They were absolutely amazed by it and some minutes later I had a correct answer.

Then this will be the most interesting book you've read this year: http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

The problem boils down to just one thing. The teachers don't understand what they're teaching themselves, so they confuse memorization and repetition with learning. The students who are good at this are rewarded because they do better in the exams, and slowly but surely all the joy of understanding science is beaten out of a student.

I can relate to this personally. Until I started college, I really understood what I was learning. I enjoyed doing science and reading about. But then I made the biggest mistake of my life - I didn't put enough effort into preparing for the IIT entrance examinations and didn't make it in.

I started at the second-tier college that I went to and I realized that my teachers didn't know what they were teaching. We were supposed to be learning all this stuff about Fourier series and Laplace transforms, and I couldn't figure out where we were going with all this. I couldn't understand why certain assumptions were made and where they mattered in the proofs. It was all going above my head. When I asked my lecturers, I was branded as a disruptive student. I simply got insulted until I learned to keep my mouth shut.

I didn't do very well in my examinations either. The most marks were given to the students who could reproduce what the teacher said in the cleanest handwriting with the best figures. My writing sucked and my figures were dirty, and I wrote what I understood not what I remembered. I simply had no hope.

A few years later I started a master's degree at a top-tier institution. Man, was this a different experience! I realized I could ask questions and get intelligent answers. I realized my professors actually knew what these proofs were going to useful for! I was finally back in an environment where understanding was valued.

Unfortunately, I still haven't recovered fully. I can see myself understanding more stuff than in the past, but it's something I have to force myself to do. I use tricks I learned from Feynman and others - I try to build a visual model in my head as I'm hearing something and then I ask questions to the model to see if I'm really understanding stuff. I force myself to think about stuff all time. But this process is not automatic, and I can't help but think my undergraduate lecturers beat it out of me.

Now you'll probably be downvoted for not being politically correct, but I agree with you. At least in my experience, most Indian-educated graduates I have worked with, were very willing to use a slew of acronyms to somehow trying to convince others that if they know the acronym, then they "understand" the concept. It is hard to describe it. You'll notice it when you encounter it.