198 Teaching Minds

198 Teaching Minds acclaimed by one and all to be brilliant, and many brilliant people think that if you can’t understand what they are thinking about, then it is your fault not theirs. They are talking about complex issues that interest them, and you should be able to follow along, and if you can’t then you are a dope. This works at MIT, sort of. No MIT student happily admits to not understanding what the professor is saying. They all muddle through as best they can and are usually awestruck by even being in the pres- ence of these great men, much less being able to take a course from them. Understanding what they said, or, worse, actually being able to make use of what they said, seems unimportant by comparison. You would take a course given by Einstein, wouldn’t you, even if you didn’t understand physics? That is the attitude. This attitude works at MIT. But it fails miserably at lesser schools. I took advanced calculus from a superstar when I was an under- graduate. I didn’t understand anything. I was a math major, but that course caused me to lose interest in math and start thinking about other things. I went to see this superstar and asked him for advice. We had a great conversation. He was a very smart guy. He pointed me in a direction that helped me make some important decisions. As a one- on-one advisor he was great. But the system made him teach, which really wasn’t something he could do very well. As luck would have it, years later when I was chairman of the Computer Science Department at Yale, he was one of my faculty. So, in a sense he wound up working for me (to the extent that any faculty member actually works for the chair, which is really not the case). He was a great man. He inspired many a graduate student to be- come a professor. He was fun to talk to. But he couldn't teach at all. At Yale we made sure that he taught only specialty courses, which was fine with him. What he was doing teaching advanced calculus that year long ago is anybody’s guess. My guess is that as he was the chairman of the Math Department at the time, either he got stuck with it because there was nobody else or he was trying to prove a point in order to in- duce senior faculty to come down from on high and teach the basics. Either way it was a terrible idea. Prestigious universities that recruit superstars are not, at the same time, recruiting teachers. They are just hoping someone can and will teach. But no one cares that much. Tonce had dinner with a man who was on the Board of Trustees of the University of Hlinois. I asked him how he liked being on the board HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023944