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Last January, I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina, and started a new job as a Physics professor. Spring was largely transition, teaching one light course here and making several long trips back north to keep the research project there going. Then came the summer, with a greater-than-usual blitz of travel and urgent work.

This fall, I started here for real. Now I’m really teaching! (And quite a lot of work it is, too.)

I’ve taught before, sort of: lots of labs and discussion sections as a TA, an outdoor leadership program for high school students, short and long teacher professional development programs… but that’s not the same has having responsibility for a full-scale university “lecture” course with ~60 students and 3 contact hours per week.

This fall, I’ve been teaching Conceptual Physics, a general education course with 55-ish students, drawing from all four class years (most heavily from freshmen and seniors) and almost every major on campus except Physics. I have, of course, been using a classroom response system (CRS, a.k.a. “clickers”). I cannot imagine teaching a course even a third this size without it; it would be like teaching without a whiteboard or a data projector. It would like becoming deaf in the classroom.

It has been interesting to see how all the pedagogical theory that I and my colleagues have been developing has fared. It isn’t easy! I’m encountering many of the same difficulties that the high school teachers in our project have voiced — problems I’ve tried to help them resolve with all kinds of sage advice.

I am finding, of course, that it isn’t quite as easy as I’d thought. (I’m envisioning many of our teachers nodding with a small smile of vindication, and thinking “See?” Touché.) It’s not so much that I’ve been wrong, as that I’m seeing new dimensions and nuances to the problems and the solutions. In fact, having to go through many of the same CRS learning issues as my teachers is really quite instructional.

I’ll try to document some of those insights in forthcoming blog posts. One question that I’m wrestling with, however, is this: just how much should I “let it all hang out” in a public forum that my students might quite possibly discover?

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about that. I find that my faith in my basic pedagogical principles and outlook are being strengthened, not weakened, by the experience. If anything, I’m entertaining even more radical thoughts about how we can re-envision the educational enterprise. (That might scare some of you who know me well.)

Anyway, the next post will focus on my latest insight about what makes creating good CRS questions difficult, at least for me. Hint: It’s not actually about the questions, though it initially appears that way.

Apologies.

The world of educational research has long since figured out that although information can be transmitted and memorized, knowledge must be constructed by each individual. Learning (in the knowledge sense) is an ongoing process of sense-making as new ideas are integrated into the individual’s existing mental models of the world. And — here’s the kicker — how a person goes about that process, how she interprets new information and evidence, and even what she pays attention to in the first place are governed by the models she already holds. In other words, what you think you know largely determines what you see and what you will learn from it. (This perspective is called constructivism.)

In fact, humans are flat-out incapable of knowing “the truth”. From before birth we observe, model, observe more (filtered by the model), interpret (from the perspective of the model), and, when backed into a corner, revise the model. Our cerebral machinery processes and reprocesses the data of our limited senses before even the most rudimentary awareness intrudes on our conscious mind. We have no direct access to the raw stuff of reality. The best we can hope for is a collection of mental constructs that are not too fragmented, not to inconsistent, and close enough to “reality” that we can function without doing anything too stupid. If you talk to a physicist who is careful with his language, he won’t tell you about nature. He’ll tell you about models that explain, as completely and economically as possible, the observations we can make about nature.

(Are you religious? If you object to the previous paragraph on the grounds that it contradicts the notion of “divinely revealed truth”, please reconsider. Do you really believe the infinite deity and the wonders beyond this mortal coil can be perfectly, accurately, completely captured by any finite human mental constructs? We’ve been told as much about the divine as we need and can handle, no more or less.)

So it’s no wonder that people who feel President Bush is the devil incarnate can find copious evidence to strengthen their opinion, whereas those who believe he is protecting us against fanatical enemies from without and moral decay from within see many reasons to fortify theirs. We all filter, we all interpret, and our models are all self-reinforcing. We can’t help it. That’s just human nature.

Hmm… Sounds like a problem, eh? Aside from wallowing in existential angst, what can we do about this damnably inconvenient limitation?

Well, that’s why I named this blog Think Twice.

• Everybody’s world view makes sense to them, and very very few people are deliberately evil. If someone’s thinking seems obviously flawed or ill-intentioned, it’s a safe bet I don’t really understand it. And until I do, it behooves me to be very, very cautious about criticizing it. So when someone says something I disagree with and I’m inclined to condemn or ignore it, I should think twice.
• Alas, I am just as human as the rest of you (despite what my fourth college roommate said about physics majors). People I passionately disagree with are just as sure of themselves as I am of myself. Annoyingly, many of them are just as bright, well-educated, and well-informed as I. Perhaps more so. It would be hubris to think that my confidence is better founded than theirs simply because I’m me. I filter and interpret, too. So, when I think I’m right about something, I’d better think twice.
• What we know is merely an approximation of what really is, and reality is infinitely richer and more subtle than we’ll ever appreciate. When I think I understand something, I’d be wise to think twice.
• The most powerful tool we have for pushing back the limitations of the mind is awareness of those limitations. So I think, and then think about my thinking. People who like big words call this metacognition. (Once in a while, just to be careful, I think about how I think about my thinking.) Think twice! (Or three times, or…)

That’s the primary reason I named this blog as I did, but not the only one. I’m an oddball. People who get to know me in a limited context and try to place me in a convenient box — liberal, conservative, religious, rationalist, hyper-intellectual, impulsive, compulsively organized German, moody Celt, whatever — are invariably wrong. Or rather, they’re 10% right and 90% wrong. For that reason I very much dislike labels. Even labels that are technically correct, because I fit the strict definition, tend to be so encrusted with inaccurate connotations and assumptions that they rankle. So if you think you’ve got me pegged, think twice.

I wonder how many of us really do fit into nice neat boxes. Next time I stick a label on someone, perhaps I should heed my own advice. The problem is, labels are so darned convenient…