Monday, January 12, 2009

Physics at MIT

I was a postdoc at MIT; even though I only stayed there for one year, it was enough to sense the intellectual strength of students and professors. I was trained at the Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, with a similar rigor and discipline as MIT. Back then I would´ve thought it was for sissies what I read today in the NYT: "After years of debate and research, M.I.T. has replaced a large introductory physics course with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive learning."

To me that would've sounded like Micky Mouse stuff.; hands-on, interactive learning?


Nevertheless, starting in the early nineties, by the suggestion of colleagues I started to look into more enlightened teaching and learning methods. I even took some short courses on Math and Science Education. Slowly but surely I realized that there is more than meets the eye in the works of Piaget, Vygotsky, and a score of other thinkers, that did actual research on issues of the mind and learning.

Now I see that the MIT Physics faculty "saw the light." I guess this is a good time to take all those soft subjects as Biology and Neuroscience more seriously. Psychology is still too much in the soft side for my taste. Maybe as I grow older I see the point of that too.

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