I came to the US for college from Asia to study physics (and mathematics). I actually came to study astronomy because I found it fascinating but didn't really like physics or math. My first physics encounter in college here transformed my life. There was no memorization. Instead, we had short quizzes in each class (first 5 min), weekly individual assignments, weekly group assignments (two students each), four "midterms" where one could get densely written "cheat-sheets" as well as weekly physics lab that often went on far beyond the time slot.
In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.
I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.
One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.
Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
Wdym "couldn't do"? Nobody here is studying Physics for the job opportunities but I'd say everybody who makes it past semester 4 genuinely loves Physics otherwise they'd be studying something easier.
As one example, I met quite a few graduate students from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) who ranked high enough in the entrance tests to study computer science/engineering or electrical engineering but really wanted to study physics. They all had significant pressure from their parents to choose the engineering branch and had to fit in physics electives where they could. My understanding is that the priority list was:
computer science/engineering > electrical engineering > mechanical engineering > ... > things like metallurgical engineering > ... > physics (and maybe other sciences)
Some of this is driven by job prospects while some of it is prestige driven because one's major lets one infer one's rough ranking in the entrance tests.
So it's very common to infer that if you weren't studying engineering, you didn't rank very high and barely made it past the cutoff ranks and had to study physics or metallurgical engineering.
When I was younger, I thought these rank-based systems (very common in Asian countries) are better than the fuzzier American system of grades + extracurriculars + reference letters. But my opinion is the opposite now. As soon as ranks are involved, a notion of prestige gets assigned. Once prestige is involved, people will climb over each other to get through the doors and suppress their instincts to earn social credits. I have seen enough people who are successful by traditional metrics but are miserable because they didn't spend time pursuing their interests (modulo concerns about jobs and money).
Edit: I'll add that my IIT friends were generally extremely bright, curious, creative and generally wonderful to work with. But they also had a competitive streak which could turn counter-productive. Against their own better instincts, they sometimes got locked into a path where outcomes could be measured vs exploring areas less traveled. If they saw a topic or area that attracted top minds (e.g. see AI at frontier labs today), they felt pulled in that direction because "that's where the smart people were going and they themselves were smart and therefore, should go into the arena". This is true of Asian Americans in general. After all, that's why there was an uproar that students with perfect SATs and GPAs of 4+ (5?! i.e. A++ grades) were sometimes getting rejected by Harvard. I agree with Harvard in this case. One doesn't want cookie cutter/prescriptive paths into top universities. Instead, there should be some randomness as long as students meet some decent baselines. I don't mean race-based or group-based selection. Just really random selection at least for a small fraction of students.
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
This reminded me of something from my alma mater.
At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).
Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.
Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.
I was just thinking about this earlier today when washing my hands in the sink.
When you first turn on the hot water tap in most homes, the water that comes out is cold. After some period of time, hotter water starts to come out. My mom used to describe this as "waiting for the water to warm up".
For decades, I didn't consider the mechanism behind this. That is that there is water in the pipes between the home water heater and the tap. That water can't retain its heat without any further heat input, and gradually loses heat and comes into near-equilibrium with the temperature of the rest of the house. The hot water inside the water heater tank, on the other hand, is constantly being reheated as necessary by a heating element.
When you turn on the tap, after not having used it for some time, you're waiting for cold water from the pipes to be flushed out through the tap and be replaced with freshly heated water from the tank. Once this happens, the water coming out of the tap will be hot because it's been heated recently enough.
I probably didn't realize this until I was about 30 years old, and then I thought of Feynman's anecdote of his students not connecting their theoretical knowledge to understand the mechanism of a real physical situation. It seems I wasn't curious enough as a child to apply my own knowledge to the mechanism of the hot water tap!
One of the best ways to learn to think Scientifically i.e. in terms of Physics/Chemistry/Mathematics/Biology is to start with the classic Soviet era books by Yakov Perelman - https://mirtitles.org/?s=yakov+perelman
Specifically; start with the 2-vol Physics for Entertainment (the breadth of coverage is really good) followed by Mathematics can be Fun, Algebra can be Fun etc.
Note: Do not be misled by the words "Entertainment"/"Fun" etc. in the title. As is typical of Soviet era books these are serious works with precise, succinct and focused topics quite unlike most current "pop science" books.
I don't think I have anything in my house (other than an ice cube tray?) that's meant to deliberately make cold water colder than the ambient temperature of the house! Maybe some people do, though, especially in hotter parts of the world.
Weirdly enough, this is not the case in the former Soviet Union. Because there's always a reverse pipe ("obratka") that has hot water constantly circulate and the only part that cools down is the small portion of pipe between "obratka" connection and the faucet, so "heating up" takes a second tops.
It's puzzling why no one in the civilised world adopted this idea :/
Many things are told about emigres being constantly homesick etc., and i believe this is largely bullshit, but this is the only thing i really miss from my Soviet past.
This idea comes for free if you're also using hot water in radiators as a way to heat your home at the same time. Which the Soviets did. And in the Soviet era, they also were generally heating that water at the district level, then circulating it to all of the homes. This can only be workable if you're pumping the water continuously. So the cost of the pumping is just part of the overall system.
Places where this was built up, still generally use it today.
In the USA, nobody ever built the district wide heaters. Nor would they be viable in the suburbs that many of us live in. We generally use central air instead of radiators to heat our houses. And the result is that constantly circulating hot water is significantly more expensive for us.
It’s a thing in the US too, but not common. I always understood them to be expensive to use, as you always have a pump running and hot water cooling down and needing reheating.
I've seen this in a few places, but it's rare because of all the energy (heat loss and energy required to drive the circulation) that gets used up when the water is recirculating but nobody is using it--which is most of the time.
I was recently in Iceland, and since a lot of heat is geothermal, recirc would probably make sense, but I can't remember having it. Maybe it's the pumping cost? Although natural convection driven by the difference in density between hot and cold water might make up for at least part of that.
Hot water recirculation is a thing I have heard of done in the United States. I don't know how common it is, but a simple Home Depot search brought up a bunch of results for options.
For those interested in a kind of retrospective about 40 years after Feynman's speech, read "Physics in Latin America Comes of Age" (published in 2000) by José Luis Morán‐López:
> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.
> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .
> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.
Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.
Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.
Its crazy he thinks that learning physics is the solution:
I believe that in the improvement of the technical ability, thus the productivity, of the people of Latin America lies the source of real economic advancement.
and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.
Lots of places have been unstable for many years though. China, most of Europe, Russia, India, Korea. Some have shrugged that off others haven't, so it does not seem to have much predictive power.
I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.
LATAM started from the get go being awfully disrupted from the 1500s and in catastrophic ways. Also, we don't call any of those areas Latin X. It shows how much impact the conquerors had that it even defines how we can the region to this day.
And every place actively destabilized by an empire is definitely unstable.
The amount of coups directly planned and executed or supported by the US military/intelligence/lobbying apparatus in south America and the rest of the world is incredible.
And then the presidents have the audacity to say that it is the right and responsibility of the locals to govern (as said by biden on Afghanistan exit).
It truly has been the most exploitative empire ever. I hope the Chinese do better. We'll find out.
When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
But it sure feels nice to blame your enemies instead, doesn't it? Let's all pat each other on the back that we're the victims, and only if... and leave it at that.
> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.
How could you possibly think those are the only LATAM countries the US has interfered with? We have been intimately involved in every government and every election in the Caribbean, Central, and South America for generations. Just this year there has been interference in Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, etc.
It's been many decades since I read it, but there was some mention of this in Feynman's first autobiography (Surely You're Joking). He described learning about the problem and investigating the root cause, which is also described in this speech. (The root cause was a focus on the memorization of scattered facts vs. making students understand the subject matter.)
Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
It is like teaching snowboarding. You can get the pointers but students have to actually do the snowboarding - there is no shortcut.
The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
Classroom setting is also not really good one unless you have small groups on the same level - larger group and you are just pulling slow ones up and fast ones are getting bored.
As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
> Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
Having been taught in different systems that emphasize understanding vs memorization, I'd have to disagree. The teachers and the overall academic system can encourage, test for, and reward rote memorization. Or it can encourage, test for, and reward problem-solving, critical thinking, and understanding.
Everything from the way teachers lecture, to assigned reading, to assignments, to tests will influence how students think and what they optimize for. There will always be exceptions who forge their own path, but most students like most people just go with the flow.
Students study to pass exams, teachers teach to enable students to pass exams. If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for.
I agree with your both of your observations; And I also think what's missing is the acknowledgement that connects the two. Students come with the expectation of "chew it for me" and schools have the expectation of "I'm going to throw the material at you, you can & will handle it yourself".
But it doesn't need to be that hopeless. Learning is a skill and schools can help each individual find the ways working best for them. Starting by not packing gazillion number of people in a class.
> The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
As a university level educator I am pretty confident most universities worth their salt do in fact teach you by "actually doing the snowboarding" to stay with your analogy.
But it is also true that (1) not all universities (or all departments, or all professors) are worth their salt and (2) snowboarding may not be a skill that is highly sought after in the society you live in.
Gladly most academic skillsets are highly transferable if the student isn't totally dull.
This speech by Feynman was based on his experiences teaching Physics in Brazil in the 1950s (details mentioned in the "Surely You're Joking" book). "tomhow" has posted the link to a previous HN discussion specifically w.r.t. the Brazil experience.
However, this speech generalizes and posits that the problem is not specific to Latin America but to most countries (including so-called developed ones) in the teaching of Physics or any other Science.
Hence the opening para;
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
I think this is highly pertinent today given the use of AI/LLM models for extracting "correct answers" to all of settled (mostly) Science. At least with a textbook you had to expend some thought/effort; with AI tools even that is removed and you literally need know/understand even less than before.
So where does that leave Science Education? How do we reform the Education System?
Speaking from Uruguay, this characterization feels outdated. Our public universities emphasize problem-solving, experimentation, and strong theoretical foundations, and they produce graduates who work globally in engineering, physics, and software.
Programs like Plan Ceibal normalized hands-on computing early on, and there’s a healthy connection between academia, industry, and research institutes. Brain drain exists everywhere, but it’s no longer accurate to describe countries like Uruguay as stuck in rote learning or disconnected from real-world application. Latin America isn’t monolithic, and some of these critiques reflect a 1960s snapshot more than today’s reality.
Naturally it feels outdated as it was a speech from 62 years ago. Multiple generations of science education and teaching paradigms have come and gone since then.
This resonated with my own experience: exams rewarded recall, not understanding. I only really “earned physics when I started building things and breaking them. Curious how others here learned to move from memorization to intuition.
Caltech tests were not based on memorization, as they were "open book open note". You had to reason your way to a solution.
But I do agree that real world physics, like designing an actual electronic circuit, have behaviors that are not modeled by the usual mathematical models. For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance. And I was told, when building digital circuits, to make sure it worked with chips faster than the spec, as replacement chips are always faster, never slower.
> For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance
Resistors are sometimes marked with their variance band (+/-1%, for instance) to account for this.
Engineers take these expected variances into account when designing circuits. If your design is sensitive to a 3% variance in resistor value, you'd better not be specifying gold-banded +/-5% lots.
One issue he mentioned is still true today in Brazil's universities: while in theory you can ask to transfer from one course to another, in practice you have to drop out of your current school and take the entrance exam for the other one. And then you waste a lot of time trying to get your grades for the courses you have already taken recognized as equivalent so you don't have to start from scratch.
For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.
I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.
Readit News
In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.
I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.
One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.
Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.
Wdym "couldn't do"? Nobody here is studying Physics for the job opportunities but I'd say everybody who makes it past semester 4 genuinely loves Physics otherwise they'd be studying something easier.
computer science/engineering > electrical engineering > mechanical engineering > ... > things like metallurgical engineering > ... > physics (and maybe other sciences)
Some of this is driven by job prospects while some of it is prestige driven because one's major lets one infer one's rough ranking in the entrance tests.
So it's very common to infer that if you weren't studying engineering, you didn't rank very high and barely made it past the cutoff ranks and had to study physics or metallurgical engineering.
When I was younger, I thought these rank-based systems (very common in Asian countries) are better than the fuzzier American system of grades + extracurriculars + reference letters. But my opinion is the opposite now. As soon as ranks are involved, a notion of prestige gets assigned. Once prestige is involved, people will climb over each other to get through the doors and suppress their instincts to earn social credits. I have seen enough people who are successful by traditional metrics but are miserable because they didn't spend time pursuing their interests (modulo concerns about jobs and money).
Edit: I'll add that my IIT friends were generally extremely bright, curious, creative and generally wonderful to work with. But they also had a competitive streak which could turn counter-productive. Against their own better instincts, they sometimes got locked into a path where outcomes could be measured vs exploring areas less traveled. If they saw a topic or area that attracted top minds (e.g. see AI at frontier labs today), they felt pulled in that direction because "that's where the smart people were going and they themselves were smart and therefore, should go into the arena". This is true of Asian Americans in general. After all, that's why there was an uproar that students with perfect SATs and GPAs of 4+ (5?! i.e. A++ grades) were sometimes getting rejected by Harvard. I agree with Harvard in this case. One doesn't want cookie cutter/prescriptive paths into top universities. Instead, there should be some randomness as long as students meet some decent baselines. I don't mean race-based or group-based selection. Just really random selection at least for a small fraction of students.
What places are these?
This reminded me of something from my alma mater.
At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).
Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.
Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.
When you first turn on the hot water tap in most homes, the water that comes out is cold. After some period of time, hotter water starts to come out. My mom used to describe this as "waiting for the water to warm up".
For decades, I didn't consider the mechanism behind this. That is that there is water in the pipes between the home water heater and the tap. That water can't retain its heat without any further heat input, and gradually loses heat and comes into near-equilibrium with the temperature of the rest of the house. The hot water inside the water heater tank, on the other hand, is constantly being reheated as necessary by a heating element.
When you turn on the tap, after not having used it for some time, you're waiting for cold water from the pipes to be flushed out through the tap and be replaced with freshly heated water from the tank. Once this happens, the water coming out of the tap will be hot because it's been heated recently enough.
I probably didn't realize this until I was about 30 years old, and then I thought of Feynman's anecdote of his students not connecting their theoretical knowledge to understand the mechanism of a real physical situation. It seems I wasn't curious enough as a child to apply my own knowledge to the mechanism of the hot water tap!
Specifically; start with the 2-vol Physics for Entertainment (the breadth of coverage is really good) followed by Mathematics can be Fun, Algebra can be Fun etc.
Note: Do not be misled by the words "Entertainment"/"Fun" etc. in the title. As is typical of Soviet era books these are serious works with precise, succinct and focused topics quite unlike most current "pop science" books.
It's puzzling why no one in the civilised world adopted this idea :/
Many things are told about emigres being constantly homesick etc., and i believe this is largely bullshit, but this is the only thing i really miss from my Soviet past.
Places where this was built up, still generally use it today.
In the USA, nobody ever built the district wide heaters. Nor would they be viable in the suburbs that many of us live in. We generally use central air instead of radiators to heat our houses. And the result is that constantly circulating hot water is significantly more expensive for us.
Does that answer your question?
Hot water recirculating pump. https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/hot-water-recirculati...
I was recently in Iceland, and since a lot of heat is geothermal, recirc would probably make sense, but I can't remember having it. Maybe it's the pumping cost? Although natural convection driven by the difference in density between hot and cold water might make up for at least part of that.
https://www.plumbingsupply.com/recirculating-systems-explain...
https://www.homedepot.com/s/hot%20recirculation?NCNI-5
Deleted Comment
> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.
> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .
> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.
https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/physics-in-latin-ameri...
https://aip.brightspotcdn.com/PTO.v53.i10.38_1.online.pdf
Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.
Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.
and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.
LATAM started from the get go being awfully disrupted from the 1500s and in catastrophic ways. Also, we don't call any of those areas Latin X. It shows how much impact the conquerors had that it even defines how we can the region to this day.
And every place actively destabilized by an empire is definitely unstable.
The amount of coups directly planned and executed or supported by the US military/intelligence/lobbying apparatus in south America and the rest of the world is incredible.
And then the presidents have the audacity to say that it is the right and responsibility of the locals to govern (as said by biden on Afghanistan exit).
It truly has been the most exploitative empire ever. I hope the Chinese do better. We'll find out.
Deleted Comment
But it sure feels nice to blame your enemies instead, doesn't it? Let's all pat each other on the back that we're the victims, and only if... and leave it at that.
Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.
Dead Comment
Latin America is bigger than Cuba and Chile...
It is like teaching snowboarding. You can get the pointers but students have to actually do the snowboarding - there is no shortcut.
The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
Classroom setting is also not really good one unless you have small groups on the same level - larger group and you are just pulling slow ones up and fast ones are getting bored.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
Having been taught in different systems that emphasize understanding vs memorization, I'd have to disagree. The teachers and the overall academic system can encourage, test for, and reward rote memorization. Or it can encourage, test for, and reward problem-solving, critical thinking, and understanding.
Everything from the way teachers lecture, to assigned reading, to assignments, to tests will influence how students think and what they optimize for. There will always be exceptions who forge their own path, but most students like most people just go with the flow.
But it doesn't need to be that hopeless. Learning is a skill and schools can help each individual find the ways working best for them. Starting by not packing gazillion number of people in a class.
Problem sets with feedback.
But it is also true that (1) not all universities (or all departments, or all professors) are worth their salt and (2) snowboarding may not be a skill that is highly sought after in the society you live in.
Gladly most academic skillsets are highly transferable if the student isn't totally dull.
https://www.drjez.com/uco/Misc/Feynman.htm
https://archive.org/details/surelyyourejokin0000feyn/page/21... (starts on page 11)
However, this speech generalizes and posits that the problem is not specific to Latin America but to most countries (including so-called developed ones) in the teaching of Physics or any other Science.
Hence the opening para;
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
I think this is highly pertinent today given the use of AI/LLM models for extracting "correct answers" to all of settled (mostly) Science. At least with a textbook you had to expend some thought/effort; with AI tools even that is removed and you literally need know/understand even less than before.
So where does that leave Science Education? How do we reform the Education System?
Programs like Plan Ceibal normalized hands-on computing early on, and there’s a healthy connection between academia, industry, and research institutes. Brain drain exists everywhere, but it’s no longer accurate to describe countries like Uruguay as stuck in rote learning or disconnected from real-world application. Latin America isn’t monolithic, and some of these critiques reflect a 1960s snapshot more than today’s reality.
But I do agree that real world physics, like designing an actual electronic circuit, have behaviors that are not modeled by the usual mathematical models. For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance. And I was told, when building digital circuits, to make sure it worked with chips faster than the spec, as replacement chips are always faster, never slower.
Resistors are sometimes marked with their variance band (+/-1%, for instance) to account for this.
Engineers take these expected variances into account when designing circuits. If your design is sensitive to a 3% variance in resistor value, you'd better not be specifying gold-banded +/-5% lots.
All my engineering exams were open book, open notes, and still >50% failed out by senior year.
For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.
I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.