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Hi I'm dr Tae and this is a talk similar to the one I recently gave to my last group of students

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At northwestern university. On the last day of class.

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A lot of my students wanted me to post the video of the original lecture online.

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But instead of doing that I'm doing this,

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I'm re-reccording this presentation.

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Just for you!

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So here it is: Building a new culture of teaching and learning

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But why do we need to build something new?

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what's wrong with our current current culture of teaching and learning?

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I can summarize the problem in two words:

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School Sucks!

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kids say this all the time and nobody listen, but now I'm saying it.

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And its an idea that we need to start taking very seriously.

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Because its true school does sucks, especially when it comes to math and science education,

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which is going to be the main focus of my talk.

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So before we get to the part about building a new culture of teaching and learning,

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we need to take a carefull look at what's wrong with our education now.

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Let's start at the top with universities:

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the environnement I've been in for the past sixteen years.

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Universities are ideal places to teach and learn,

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and we can certainly turn to them for educationnal leadership.

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Actually no!

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"Universities are not doing a good job."

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And I'm not the only one whose noticed.

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this quote is actually from Leon Lederman,

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and he thinks there is a problem we should at least here him out.

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Dr. Lederman is a former director of Fermilab he won the nobel price in physics,

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and he also know something about education:

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he started his own school the "illinois mathematics and science academy".

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Here is Leon Lederman in an interview with the science network.

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Right now my biggest anger is with the universities,

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because universities are not doing a good job.

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They do not continue the insperation that kids getting out of high schools have about science.

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there's teachers, and their students that are getting out of high school who say:

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I'm a science major I love chemistry I love biologie,

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and then they go to college and 50% of those kids change feels into none science feels.

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That's the statictical data.

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Why!

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Because they go onto a class of 200 kids they see a small professor somewhere down there.

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You know, or maybe a teaching assistant whose english is not so good.

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The blame is on the universities, depersonalized.

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You know, Kids in high school ok at least there is 20 or 40 kids in a class,

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and these lecture rooms for physics one or chemestry one they are hudge.

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I think its UCLA, at least at one point had an auditorial with 400 kids.

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All just sitting there listening to this one professor.

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You could hardly, you know, see him, or with binoculars.

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Oh! there he is, he's down there...

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Doctor Lederman use the word depersonalized,

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and it captures a lot of what's wrong in our universities.

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Here is a picture I took of a lecture class at NorthWestern.

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It's just one of many examples of "depersonalizition 1 0 1".

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First this snapshoot illustrate a gigantic failure in leadership:

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people at universitie approve this ridiculous format has an ok way to teach.

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Second the professor at the podium made no attempt to engage the students

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that were right in front of him.

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The final and most disturbing thing

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is what the students are doing:

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they're falling asleep, checking facebook or they're email,

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or paradoxically regestering for next term classes

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right in the midlle of class they're completely tuning out.

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Maybe they want to make sure they get a spot in "depersonalization 1 0 2".

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Just try and put yourself in this room.

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Would you pay tuitions to sit in this room?

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Does this environement suit how you learn?

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Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty I've a lively exchange of ideas.

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And that isn't happening because the culture is become so depersonalized.

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And university leaders faculty and students collectivly let that happenned.

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We should think twice before we refered to a prestigious university has a good school.

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Sadly universities arn't exempt from school sucks.

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Now I need to explain why secondary school suck.

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and I'll start by citing american finest news source: the onion.

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"Increasing number of educators found to be suffering from teaching disabilities"

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Here is my favourite part of the article:

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It's funny cause its true!

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And here is some comments from Lawrence Krauss that might explain why its true.

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Dr Krauss is director of the Origins initiative at Arizona state,

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and he does a lot of work to promote good science education.

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Here is a scary statistic:

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So we compared american students to their counterparts in other 20, 25 other industrialization,

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and there were recent study that came out.

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So we look at kids in grad three and grade five

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and then fifteen year old.

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and what's amazing is grade three and grrade five american students

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on the whole do better in science and mathematics

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than their counterparts.

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but by the time they're fifteen they do subsentially worse

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So we've be doing something very effective to de-educate them or disinterest them in science

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and one of the reason is another equally scary fact which is that.

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over ninety percent of middle school science teachers in this country

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have never taken a science course outside of highschool.

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and..

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what..what percentage was that?

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over ninety percent.

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ninety!

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ninety, yea.

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not nine!

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no, ninety ...

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I had the same reaction than richards dawkings:

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what! How did this happened? How did we let so many unqualified teachers into our schools?

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I think one reason is hiring practices.

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School sucks because the people who run them don't hire great teachers.

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Once again lets start at the top:

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At universities professors aren't really hired to teach.

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they hired and promoted based on the research they do.

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As a result teaching its rarely a priority for professors and it shows.

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Last year I was on a faculty pannel for advising graduate students

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about getting academic jobs and, the other professors on the pannel admited

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that teaching wasn't that important in getting a faculty position

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One of the professor on the pannel was a department chair.

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And she actually reffered to her department school offerings

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as a teaching burden

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that the kind of leadership we have at our universities.

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At the secondary level the problem is hiring teachers

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who just don't know what they are talking about,

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especially in the sciences.

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Here I want to point out the difference between: certification and qualifications.

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For example: I have a Phd in physics, I've been teaching for fireteen years,

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but I'd probably have a hard time getting job teaching at a public school.

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why? Because I never wasted time in a programm to get certified

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to teach in a public school.

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That's backwards!

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If its true that our public schools are already full of certified teachers

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who don't know what they're doing

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then that means the certification process we have right now doesn't work!

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if we want to start getting truly qualified teachers

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we need to get ride of this fraudulent certification system.

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And start hiring people based on real competency.

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The lesson here is that schools have hiring practices that are barriers to getting great teachers.

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And the immediate consequence is that schools at every level

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are full of teachers who can't teach or don't want to teach.

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Now if math and science education

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is really in shambles,

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how did someone like me get into science?

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Well its not because I was immerse in a nationnal culture dedicated to math and science education:

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I was just lucky!

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This is Dean Goldgar the person who got me interested in calculus.

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His high shcool calculus class was better than all the math classes into college.

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Mister Goldar have even work with me outside of class

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so I can study more advanced topic in mathematics.

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He was a real mentor.

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This is Kurt Wiesenfeld.

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My undergraduate mentor.

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Dr wiesenfeld taught the very first college physic class I took,

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and he inspired me to major in physics.

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But that first class was special.

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It was an honor section that only eight students bother sign up for.

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How lucky was that!

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why hundreds of other kids were sitting in lecture halls.

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Eight of us hit the jackpot and had this professor all to ourselves,

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five days a week.

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It was personalized. And it had a huge impact on me.

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Noticed I'm not telling you stories about shiny new building or computer labs or

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interactive whiter boards that really had an influence on me.

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I'm talking about great teachers,

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and unfortunately great teachers are rare.

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David Griffiths understand this important point

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He said:

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That exactly right,

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but schools aren't doing enough of that.

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Now I want to shift years and talk more specifically about sciences classes.

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Dean Zollman had this great story about giving its eight year old daughter

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a tour of the physics building at his university.

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Enventually they came across a lecture hall full of students.

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His daughter asked:

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"What do all those people doing?"

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And Zollmen gave what seems like a reasonable answer:

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"They're learning physics."

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And its daughter responded with the exactly the right question:

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"DO they just sit there?"

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YEA, they do just sit there!

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And an eight year old can see right away

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that there is something horribly wrong with that.

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A lot of science classes are set up to be completely unscientific.

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The first problem is that students just sit there.

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But if you're going to learn science you can just sit there!

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You have to think, and better yet, you have to do experiments: that's what labs are for.

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Unfortunately many labs exercices aren't any fun,

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and sometimes they don't even demonstrate phenomena in a convincing way.

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But teachers don't have to be convincing: because they have authority on their side.

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And they can use grades to enforce that authority.

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Who needs evidence!

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Science its true because the teacher said so and I have to know it for the test otherwise I'll get a bad grade!

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That's the message that comes across when science teachers doesn't really understand science.

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And its the exact opposite of what science is about.

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Here is an example.

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Lets assume you've never seen this thing before.

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Boy it sure does look like sciency!

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I want you to memorize the content of this slide all of it:

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the names of the compounds, the sequence of the reactions were are the arrows

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you even have to learn how to prounonce "phosphorylation".

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You must reproduce this drawing from memory next week on a test.

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Lets say you manage to pull this off and get an hundred percent on the test.

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Congratulations! You haven't learn a damn thing about science.

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Whay I just describe was my experience in highschool biology.

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I had to memorize a lot of stuff that wasn't justified with any evidence.

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I didn't get to do a single expirement to convince myself that anything in that diagram is true.

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And if I didn't memorize all that stuff. I was gonna get a bad grade.

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Actually, it was worse than that:

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if I did a really good job at memorizing the material without thinking or understanding,

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I'd get a good grade!

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That is NOT the lesson we want to teach in our science classes.

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There has to be a better way.

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Where can we fing a good role model for science classes?

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How about these guys?

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"Myth Busters" is the most scientific show on television.

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Because as they say:

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"They don't just tell the myths they put them to the test!"

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The idea at the core of Myth Busters is the same as the core of science.

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If you want to figure out if something is true, you have to do the experiment.

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So in Myth Busters if the claims of a myth agree with experiments the myth is confirmed.

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If the claims of the myth disagree with the experiments its busted.

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That's just how science work.

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And that's the lessons that kids need to learn.

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Science classes should be Myth Busters projects that kids can do.

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But there is one itch.

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Addam and Jammy always give this warning at the beginning of every show:

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Please don't try anything that you are about to see us do at home.

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Ever!

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Maybe lawers are getting in the way of science education.

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Of course we don't want kids injuring themselves by filling their lunchboxes with thermite.

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But we do want kids to copy the spirit of Myth Busters.

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We should encourage kids to try experiments at home, and try to figure things out for themselves.

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That's way more scientific than just telling kids to memorize stuff in science books.

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Our last stop in school sucks, has to do with learning.

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If schools and school reforms are going to be effective.

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They have to be design to help people learn.

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Here's how school are typically structured:

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there's a school year divided into terms, and in each term there is specific courses avalaible and a fixed amount of time to learn the material in each course and the instructor evaluates the students somehow and gives our grades...

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NONE of these features are necessary for learning.

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And I think they actually interfere with the learning process.

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Why would I say that?

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Because I have a better model of learning.

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Skatboarding!

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So what can skatboarding tell us about the learning process?

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Lets find out.

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This next section also happens to be the motivation from my physics of skateboarding project.

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Which you can check out at: physicsofskateboarding.com

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What I'm going to show you is a video of me trying to learn a new skateboarding trick.

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This is a trick I had never even tried before:

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a pop shove it nose manual shove it out.

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I want you to focus on this video, really watch it carefully.

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Because its a vivid example of what the learning process is really like.

243
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So here the ingredients of the trick.

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A pop shove it were I pop the board up and it turns an hundred and eighty degrees.

245
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A nose manual were I balance over the front wheels.

246
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And, a little shove it off the nose another hundred and eighty degrees.

247
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But now I have to learn how to put those tricks together into something new.

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Shiiit !

249
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Woua. Why am I almost dying every time I try this?!

250
00:15:33,233 --> 00:15:35,658
Doing the trick is impossible!

251
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Holly shit!

252
00:16:16,907 --> 00:16:21,319
Noticed that I didn't get it first try or second try.

253
00:16:21,319 --> 00:16:26,969
I didn't show you all of the attemps, but I had to try this trick fifty eight times!

254
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That means in the process of learning this trick:

255
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I failed fifty seven times!

256
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Interesting...

257
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Skatboarding had helped us discover the secret to learning.

258
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Here it is:

259
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Work your ass off until you figure it out.

260
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If that seems overly simplistic to you, let me some more examples.

261
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Learning how to walk.

262
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That's a picture of me and my sister.

263
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We don't need to send toddlers to walking schools

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so that can get bad grades if they don't learn how to walk in exactly one semester.

265
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We just let toddlers keep trying to walk untill they do.

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Learning an instrument.

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There was a time when I was actually pretty good at playing the guitarre

268
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But its not something I learned in school.

269
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I just practiced as much as I could because I wanted to play better.

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And I don't know of many people who take guitarre lessons

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that's involve hundreds of students in a lecture hall.

272
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Music instruction is almost always personalized.

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Learning Mathematics.

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Not that he needs one but I have to give Malcolm Gladwell applaud here.

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Because he has new book out called "Outliers".

276
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And there is a great story in there, from Allan Schoenfeld,

277
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a professor at Berkeley who studies how people learn mathematics.

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Shoenfeld tells us the story of a nurse named Renee,

279
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who is using computer program to understand the slope of a vertical line.

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Here is the important passage:

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"Twenty-two minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer program to the moment she says:

282
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'Ahhhh, that means something to me now.' That's a long time."

283
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Renee had to wrestle with a mathematical concept for a long time,

284
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before it started making any sense.

285
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That's what learning mathematics and science is really like!

286
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Our schools arn't set up to handle that.

287
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Scientific Research.

288
00:18:25,074 --> 00:18:27,931
This is an entry of one of my notbooks from grade school,

289
00:18:27,931 --> 00:18:32,025
when I finally figured out how to solve a problem I've been working on for months.

290
00:18:32,025 --> 00:18:37,832
But before that day I had already filled a bunch of other note books with tons with other ideas

291
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that didn't work at all.

292
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I had lots and lots of failures before I finally figured it out.

293
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Sound familiar?

294
00:18:46,220 --> 00:18:48,767
So here is the head to head comparison:

295
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Schools vs Skateboarding.

296
00:18:51,345 --> 00:18:56,324
and when I say skatboarding I really mean the process of learning anything properly.

297
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I can't go into details with all of these points,

298
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but just look how different these two cultures are.

299
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Schools have rigid time-tables, fixed amount of time for learning material.

300
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That's incredibly stupid!

301
00:19:10,595 --> 00:19:14,900
All that does is stop us from develloping the kind of persistents we need,

302
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for real learning and real understanding.

303
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If you're learning something new, it doesn't make the least bit of sense to decide ahead of time

304
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exactly how long its supposed to take you to learn it.

305
00:19:26,361 --> 00:19:31,015
That's like saying I'm gonna get an 'F' if I don't land my skateboarding trick in ten tries,

306
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or I'm never going to understand the fundamental theorem of calculus if I can't do it in a week.

307
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No.

308
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If there's something you really have to learn,

309
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you keep working your ass off untill you figured it out.

310
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And that crucial for math and science education.

311
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Just like skateboarders struggling with new tricks,

312
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students need to learn how to struggle with new ideas without getting cut off.

313
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Next its surprising how many schools plays authority and coercion at the fundation of the learning environment.

314
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Instead of giving good reasons for learning teachers give threats in the form of bad grades.

315
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That just pits teacher and students against each other,

316
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and most experienced teachers know that you can't really force someone to learn something,

317
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if they don't want to learn it.

318
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But that's exactly what our schools try to do.

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Real learning is largely self motivated.

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If students have good reasons to learn they'll want to learn,

321
00:20:28,378 --> 00:20:34,096
and a self-motivated student, paired with the right mentor can learn a lot.

322
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In schools grades gives also students a sense of false certification.

323
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It's disturbing how many students think they mastered something,

324
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just because a teacher gave them an A in a class.

325
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In real learning student have to be honest and evaluating themselves.

326
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They can't kid about themselves about they learned.

327
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For example the skateboarding trick I did in the video.

328
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Here is an honnest assesment: "I only landed that trick once, and I can pretend I mastered it".

329
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With skateboarding and calculus and physics, nobody ever gets it at first try,

330
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and we can let students think they mastered something just because they've seen it once.

331
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Mastery takes practice.

332
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Schools also have to worry about preventing cheating and other forms of academic dishonnesty.

333
00:21:20,860 --> 00:21:26,569
It would be way easier to have a culture that just didn't give incentives to cheat: like grades!

334
00:21:26,569 --> 00:21:32,390
If you're goal is to learn something properly there isn't much point in faking it.

335
00:21:32,390 --> 00:21:36,138
And in skatboarding I'm not even sure what it means to cheat.

336
00:21:36,138 --> 00:21:41,806
I don't know how to cheat in skateboarding it doesn't really exists, it's not applicable.

337
00:21:42,130 --> 00:21:43,449
So there you have it:

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if we want to improve education especially math and science education.

339
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We should make it more like skateboarding.

340
00:21:50,568 --> 00:21:54,276
But if you ever want to ruin anything...

341
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Make it more like school!

342
00:21:56,639 --> 00:22:01,063
Now we can get back to the original optimistic purpose of this talk:

343
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Building a new culture of teaching and learning.

344
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Were do we start?

345
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Well we need to fix our schools,

346
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But when I say that, it means that we have to change the fundamental culture in schools,

347
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to support how people actually learn.

348
00:22:16,574 --> 00:22:21,302
On top of that, we need to get leaders, who hire great teachers.

349
00:22:21,302 --> 00:22:26,640
I want to emphasize that changing the cultures is the priority.

350
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If get better teachers, they need to teach the right things, in the right environment.

351
00:22:31,913 --> 00:22:35,370
If all they do is re-enforce the existing culture,

352
00:22:35,370 --> 00:22:38,263
and just do better job of teaching to the test,

353
00:22:38,263 --> 00:22:40,969
well, I don't think that's progress.

354
00:22:40,969 --> 00:22:45,292
That's why I'm weary of teacher recruiment programs like "Teach For America".

355
00:22:45,292 --> 00:22:50,535
Because changing the structure of schools isn't an explicit goal in those kind of programs.

356
00:22:50,535 --> 00:22:56,118
Anyway, making all of these changes might seem like trying to polish a turd.

357
00:22:56,118 --> 00:23:01,599
But here is the case for optimism, and if you've seen that episode of Myth Busters,

358
00:23:01,599 --> 00:23:03,084
you know what's coming up...

359
00:23:03,084 --> 00:23:06,924
as it turns out: you CAN polish a turd!

360
00:23:07,263 --> 00:23:13,394
Here is how I polished a turd called physics 330-2: advanced classical mechanics.

361
00:23:13,394 --> 00:23:17,341
The typical way to teach classes like this is to get a professor to lecture,

362
00:23:17,341 --> 00:23:21,256
and have the students sit there, screw that! I did something different.

363
00:23:21,256 --> 00:23:27,569
First of all I didn't give a single lecture. I didn't want my students just sitting there,

364
00:23:27,569 --> 00:23:29,672
I turn the classes into workshops.

365
00:23:29,672 --> 00:23:35,885
My students came to class, worked together and really wrestle with difficult physics problems.

366
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And of course they got a lot of stuff wrong.

367
00:23:39,215 --> 00:23:44,556
And I would help them through that. But in that process the big advantage from me,

368
00:23:44,556 --> 00:23:48,307
was that I could see how my students were thinking into real time,

369
00:23:48,307 --> 00:23:52,033
and I could give them meaningfull feedback on the spot.

370
00:23:52,033 --> 00:23:56,067
You know the students and the professor were actually having a:

371
00:23:56,067 --> 00:23:58,619
"Lively exchange of ideas".

372
00:23:58,619 --> 00:24:02,017
The whole point at being at the university!

373
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So it really is possible to change the culture in the classroom.

374
00:24:06,744 --> 00:24:11,018
We just need teachers who are willing to take a chance on making those changes.

375
00:24:11,018 --> 00:24:14,645
But we also need to work outside the world of our classroom.

376
00:24:14,645 --> 00:24:19,177
And this where I think the biggest changes in our culture of teaching and learning can happen.

377
00:24:19,177 --> 00:24:22,928
I thought I invented the term distributed teaching.

378
00:24:22,928 --> 00:24:25,818
There doesn't seems to be a Wikipedia page for it,

379
00:24:25,818 --> 00:24:29,161
but, google says that other peolpe have used the phrase.

380
00:24:29,161 --> 00:24:31,879
So I should probably explain my version.

381
00:24:31,879 --> 00:24:36,638
The name distributing teaching was inspired by distributing computing.

382
00:24:36,638 --> 00:24:39,439
If you're not familiar with distributed computing,

383
00:24:39,439 --> 00:24:42,944
you should look out the SETI@home project as an example.

384
00:24:42,944 --> 00:24:48,889
But the basic idea is that using a lot of relatively slow computers part time,

385
00:24:48,889 --> 00:24:53,673
might be just as usefull as a single super-computer running full throttle.

386
00:24:53,673 --> 00:24:56,319
So what I mean by distributing teaching,

387
00:24:56,319 --> 00:25:00,430
is that, if everybody did some kind of teaching in they spare time,

388
00:25:00,430 --> 00:25:06,492
that might be just as effective as having a group of full time teachers.

389
00:25:06,492 --> 00:25:09,718
So how do we start doing distributing teaching?

390
00:25:09,718 --> 00:25:11,830
Well, we're already doing it.

391
00:25:11,830 --> 00:25:17,389
The main tool using for distrubuting computing, is also usefull for distributing teaching:

392
00:25:17,389 --> 00:25:19,052
The Internet.

393
00:25:19,052 --> 00:25:22,590
I'm putting this talk online, that's one form of distributed teaching.

394
00:25:22,590 --> 00:25:26,241
Wikipidea is another kind of distributed teaching.

395
00:25:26,241 --> 00:25:30,449
Lots of people can share what they know in varying amounts,

396
00:25:30,449 --> 00:25:32,390
and contribute when they can.

397
00:25:32,390 --> 00:25:35,989
And it works just as well as traditionnaly encyclopedia

398
00:25:35,989 --> 00:25:38,835
offer by a limited number of people.

399
00:25:38,835 --> 00:25:41,389
Of course the idea of distributed teaching

400
00:25:41,389 --> 00:25:44,618
isn't just for the Internet, you can also do it in person.

401
00:25:44,618 --> 00:25:49,930
This summer I'm going to film a documentary about a group of scientist and engineers,

402
00:25:49,930 --> 00:25:53,033
who are going to be teaching at a space camp in south Korea.

403
00:25:53,033 --> 00:25:56,075
None of these people are professional teachers.

404
00:25:56,075 --> 00:26:00,765
They're just spending a little of their time, to share what they know with some kids.

405
00:26:00,765 --> 00:26:05,980
If all of us started things like this it would start adding up pretty quickly.

406
00:26:05,980 --> 00:26:11,562
But distributed teaching is only going to work, if you start contributed.

407
00:26:11,562 --> 00:26:15,593
But, why should you bother spending time sharing what you know?

408
00:26:15,593 --> 00:26:20,074
Well because if you don't, you're being unreasonably selfish!

409
00:26:20,074 --> 00:26:24,068
"Knowledge isn't like a cheesburger."

410
00:26:24,068 --> 00:26:28,500
I wish I could remember where I got this, its great really simple point:

411
00:26:28,500 --> 00:26:32,321
if I have a cheesburger, and I want to share it with someone.

412
00:26:32,321 --> 00:26:35,270
That means I going to end up with less for myself.

413
00:26:35,270 --> 00:26:37,430
Knowledge doesn't work that way.

414
00:26:37,430 --> 00:26:41,725
You can share what you know as much as you want and you won't lose any of it.

415
00:26:41,725 --> 00:26:45,080
There is no reason to be selfish with knowledge.

416
00:26:45,080 --> 00:26:49,866
And that's exactly why everybody should be teaching in some capacity.

417
00:26:50,558 --> 00:26:54,172
Maybe the most usefull thing distributed teaching can do,

418
00:26:54,172 --> 00:27:00,270
is drag people away from this weird notion that teaching and learning only happens in schools.

419
00:27:00,270 --> 00:27:04,936
Building a new educationnal culture isn't just about fixing schools.

420
00:27:04,936 --> 00:27:09,019
It's really about making teaching and learning cultural habit.

421
00:27:09,019 --> 00:27:11,689
Things that all of us do all the time.

422
00:27:11,689 --> 00:27:15,000
And building that new culture isn't hard.

423
00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:17,889
We just have to follow just one simple rule:

424
00:27:17,889 --> 00:27:20,981
Share What You Know.

425
00:27:20,981 --> 00:27:22,988
Thank you very much for listening.

426
00:27:22,988 --> 00:27:24,766
If you want to keep track of my projects:

427
00:27:24,766 --> 00:27:31,241
please visit: drtae.org physicsofskateboarding.com and universitae.com

428
00:27:31,241 --> 00:27:33,554
Thanks again.

429
00:27:42,340 --> 00:27:45,406
Nobody is gonna watch this!