Re: Understanding and Teaching: Who may teach Ada?

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
:>
:> In a better world, this phrase should be put in a frame,
:> and teachers should not be employed if they fail.
:> Maybe the test should be more flexible, offering a choice
:> of audience, but only for the test.
: 
: No.  That is the whole point of the test.  If you can explain it to someone
: who has the prerequisite N many years of specialized knowledge and
: experience, you may understand it thoroughly, or you may not.

No.  What I was thinking of is that if you can explain things, _during_
the test, to _some_ audience, you have demonstrated skills necessary for
(a) making explanations
(b) analysing making explanations
Then, if your job is going to be teaching another audience than that of
the test, you have proven that you can, if necessary, learn how
to prepare lectures for different sorts of audiences. If teaching
skills were an integral part of becoming a professor, things would be
better though, at least over here.

 If you can
: explain it to a layman, who DOESN'T have the specialized knowledge, who
: needs YOU to walk him through possibly YEARS of work in the course of
: minutes, you DO understand it thoroughly.

There are things to learn before you can do this, and if you have
the requirements for doing so, then a test might show this.
For example, if you are going to teach Russian school children,
the test might proove that you know Russian language, even if your
audience has been a bunch of engineers. sounds trivial,
but this is the idea: one can learn how to explain things, at least
to some extent, to different audiences. Requires work, forbids 
arrogance, and might need teching teachers, and a cultural change ;-)

: Read the section in Clifford Stoll's "Cuckoo's Egg", about his Ph.D. oral
: examination, where the department chairman asked the final question: "Why is
: the sky blue?", and then, to EVERYTHING Stoll said, responded "Can you be
: more specific?" and made him go ALL THE WAY THROUGH several years of
: multiple disciplines, to answer the question IN DETAIL and show that he knew
: it, all the way down.

A good example of teaching rhetorics. There is no good lecture absent 
skills in rhetorics. (I am not referring to the (self-)marketing
meaning of rhetorics.) However, what counts, in my view, is the
skills, (a) above, and the ability to understand what has been
going on, (b) above.


: Yeah, and it is a damned shame that the physics department chairman did not
: understand that Feynman's job in that classroom at that time was to teach
: the FRESHMEN, and HIS job was to keep the tourists OUT OF THE WAY so Feynman
: COULD teach the freshmen.

That is what made me ask whether he would have succeeded (in this
sense).

- Georg
hoping to find time, some day, for the exercises volume of the 
Lectures on Physics. Hey, preparing good exercises is another test,
I think, by which you demonstrate that you have really understood
something.