My Teaching Philosophy

I have taught for many years. I have been in classrooms, in different capacities, with students from K to 12, undergraduate, and graduate schools. I believe that a good way to teach is by empowering the students to own their knowledge, and the process to acquire it. I believe in the existence of a concrete mental process of construction. In the beginning not all thoughts are there, as time passes, more and more ideas are born and grow up to populate a community of ideas. As far as I can see the process of idea construction goes like this.

There is a basic accommodation of living matter to the surrounding space at a given time. Organisms that do not adapt, leave the space and time they occupy for other organisms. No single form of navigation in this landscape is in principle better than any other. The sum total of conditions make it possible for some organisms to stay, and others to become extinct. A big rock coming from the sky around sixty five million years ago, was not "intended" to kill any particular life form. The top of the food chain had to go. I believe that our ideas go through a "recapitulation" of a similar environmental accommodation in our brain. No single event in our experience is "intended" to teach us a lesson. There just are concrete conditions under which ideas grow, reproduce, and stay in the ecosystem of ideas that we call our "self".

I do not mean to say that meaning never appears, that this is a random process of piling up useless knowledge, upon useless knowledge until kingdom comes. In a very interesting and mysterious way, this process of idea building works. Not all ideas ever thought are around, on the contrary, there are some successful ideas called "memes", that somehow have the best chance of making their presence known, both in our personal ecology of ideas, and in what we call culture, or collective ecology of ideas. Ideas do fight to stay. Of course ideas also cooperate to stay.

My role as a teacher is to serve as a midwife of ideas. I cannot force on idea on somebody, just like I cannot make a baby appear by pure thinking. The baby has to be there to begin with. Once the baby is there I can help the parent, remember men also have ideas, to bring it up to the world of ideas. That idea, if it is good in the personal environment of ideas of that person, will grow to claim its rightfull place in this world we call our "mind".

I mainly teach physics, here I will give "two keys to physics", for those interested in this way of knowning.

One of the most important "memes" in the world of physical ideas is:

Everything is made out of parts

After this idea another important one is:

F = ma

These keys seem a bit esoteric. If you never have taken a physics class they must as well be in Greek. The rest of this note clarifies the meaning of these "keys".

The parts of everything are size dependent. For a few tenths of a meter (one meter is around three feet), we see other people's arms, legs, and mainly faces with expressions. We look at those faces since we are born, it is an innate reflex. As we look at smaller parts, we see cells, and other units of information storage and replication. We have the cell nucleus with its genetic code. At still smaller sizes we see atoms, and molecules. This process of looking at smaller and smaller distances has not stopped and now we are trying to see strings of Planck's size. This is the smallest size to which physicists can attach any meaning nowadays.

These parts interact according to Newton's second law of motion. The parts have mass m and acceleration a. This acceleration is the rate of change of velocity; velocity itself, is the rate of change of the part's position. On the left hand side of the equation we have F. This is the force, the mover, the cause of motion. We only know four forces, gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear weak, and nuclear strong.

The most familiar ones, and easier to study mathematically are the first two. Our weight is a manifestation of the first, static electricity is a manifestation of the second. Whenever a lot of this charge accumulates in the clouds above us, we can see lightning and hear thunder. The other two forces are known to us in our daily lives maybe through the press, when issues of nuclear energy policy are discussed, both peaceful and not.

With those two keys a person can understand a lot of what goes on in the physical world. These are definitely "memes" from physics to the world.