47 Comments on “Best Class Ever”   rss feed

1. Dima on Aug 20th, 2007 at 1:09 am

   Oh it was definitely philosophy & quantum mechanics (with all the various interpretations of course)

   Sean, one offtopic request - I brought a few of your previous pieces here as quotes to another blog I frequently visit and to avoid misrepresenting your views, I’d like you to check it out
   http://telicthoughts.com/what-dichotomy/#more-1731

   Okay, back on-topic!

2. Mark on Aug 20th, 2007 at 2:08 am

   Mine was an undergraduate medieval English course, where after each class the professor encouraged students with interest to join him on the long walk back to his office, where we could discuss things informally along the way. I learned so many more interesting things during those times, than in the class.

   What stands out most was him saying, in relation to where the Church was the arbiter of knowledge in those days, how instead university professors were the modern day priests.

3. Martin on Aug 20th, 2007 at 4:57 am

   Mine was a 4th year undergrad physics course on “Information theory, neural networks and pattern recognition”. The lectures were interactive, and for once I actually felt like I was learning something. And it made a committed Bayesian out of me.

4. Andy McLennan on Aug 20th, 2007 at 6:43 am

   Without question the most valuable course I ever took was baby Rudin real analysis. There were other courses (modern English poetry, Chinese Communist revolution) with more epiphanies per minute, and much more drama, but if the main goal of a college course is to give a student the tools to learn more later, they didn’t come close. Ironically (insofar as I am putting substance above style, engagement, or “passion”) the instructor was Paul Sally, who is (deservedly, as far as my experience qualifies me to judge) regarded one of the leading teachers of mathematics in this era. Perhaps he has a large bag of subtle tricks and reverse psychology jujitsu, but my naive impression was simply that the course was 100% percent about substance and 0% about him.

5. jd on Aug 20th, 2007 at 7:51 am

   Survey of British Romanticism with Larry Frank at the University of Washington in 1971. A lower-level survey course with 45 students wouldn’t seem like a good candidate for Best Course Ever, but Dr. Frank combined encyclopedic knowledge, manic energy, and deep enthusiasm in order to make this class the best I have ever taken. True, most of the discussion took place among the five people, including me, who sat in the first row & I’m not sure how the other 40 students got along; but this was a course that both challenged & excited me & gave me a sense of what kind of engagement effective critical reading & writing involved. Now that I am a professor of literature, I use that course as a benchmark for measuring my own success.

6. Jonathan Vos Post on Aug 20th, 2007 at 8:15 am

   Richard Feynman’s “Physics X” also known as “Physics as a Performing Art.”

   1 credit. No textbook. No homework. No notes. Just Feynman at the blackboard, asking “any interesting questions?” to undergrads, grads, postdocs, visitors, and then solving them in real time.

   Dazzling. Tightrope walking without a net. Too bad that those were never filmed, as were his QED lectures.

   I did used to drop in to the Food Science symposia at U.Mass,/Amherst, because they came with food. I remember the symposia on Beer, blearily, and the academically rigorous Seminar on Grits.

   Then there’s the joke from “The Closing of the American Mind” that the MBA is not a real academic degree. The gist is that to offer an allegedly academic major with the justification that an MBA degree will earn the student more money, is as suspect as offering a degree in Sexology on the basis that the student will have more orgasms.

7. Eric on Aug 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am

   My favorite undergrad class for science/math was my first QM class. Great teacher who really enjoyed teaching, and was willing to challenge the students with the material. I think if you don’t enjoy QM, you shouldn’t be a physicist… It’s just too good. But for non-science related, I would go with a Medieval History course I took. I just love that era of history, so all the professor had to do was not suck, and I would have really enjoyed it.

8. Christopher Palmer on Aug 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am

   Strangely enough, one of my most memorable college classes had nothing to do (at the time) with my major. I needed to take some humanities electives and I knew a geography professor because he was in our Amiga user’s group (yes, it was that long ago), so I signed up for his Latin American Geography class. Dr. Dawsey was enthusiastic about his material, having traveled extensively in South and Central America (including a drive from Texas to Brazil with a lot of awesome pictures and stories). As an added bonus, GIS was in its infancy at the time, but Dr. Dawsey had written a mapping program for the Amiga that really got me thinking about computer aided mapping tools. I’ve kept my knowledge and interest in the history and culture of the region (mainly though authors like Gabriel Garcia Marques and Jorge Luis Borges) and I eventually wound up doing GIS development. Coincidental to this article, I just e-mailed him recently and wrote about it on my blog.

   Former Professors

9. Stuart Coleman on Aug 20th, 2007 at 9:05 am

   “but they will always get the short end of the stick when it comes to scheduling and logistics.”

   That doesn’t seem to be true at Stanford, we seem to give the Introductory Seminars a lot of extras (for example an extra bunch of money, one professor took the class to dinner during Finals week). Of course, I don’t have to deal with the registrar, so maybe it is hard for them to get rooms, but given the publicity we put on the program I rather doubt it.

   And yes, the IntroSem “Basic Rules of Nature” is one of my better courses, even it was only a bit more technical than The Elegant Universe.

10. Mike on Aug 20th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    My most memorable class was a Philosophy course in logic, taught by Phil Hugly at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He was an outstanding scholar and teacher and the course was the most valuable course in my undergraduate program. I took it the second semester of my freshman year and learned two valuable lessons that I have carried with me through my life and my career as a mathematician: it was my first introduction to truly rigorous reasoning, and he instilled in me a passion for the truth.

11. Elliot on Aug 20th, 2007 at 10:31 am

    The Late Robert Leighton taught a class very similar to the “Physics X” described by Jonathan above. Various topics of the students choice were discussed, and a independent study project was the deliverable. He had an uncanny understanding of Physics and an infectious enthusiasm for the topic.

    Coming in second was an independent study project senior year at the University of Miami where I compared and contrasted the poetry of W. B. Yeats and William Blake with Jimi Hendrix. (hey it was 1974 ;))

    e.

12. NoJoy on Aug 20th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Three courses:

    Seminar with E.W. Dijkstra (at U.T. Austin), for his ability to strip a proof down until every step is not only necessary, but unavoidable.

    Topology with Alan Reid (at U.T. Austin), again for clarity, but also because of the way he would anthropomorphize mathematical objects in his lectures. When discussing correspondences between set elements, he would declare in his thick Scottish accent, “This little man in A grrrrrrroks this little man in B.”

    Vector Calculus (at Rice, sadly I’ve forgotten the prof’s name, unless it was Dunne). At the time I wasn’t very good about waking up for classes, but I never missed his 8:00 class. I’m still not sure how I was supposed to integrate around the top of that broken wine bottle, though.

13. Brian on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    Complex Analysis taught by Robert C. Gunning. The mathematics was elegant, but Gunning’s enthusiasm and humor were priceless.

14. Dr William Dyer on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:20 am

    My favorite undergrad class would have to be my Honors Calculus Class(basically first year calculus but w/ physics related stuff added to it) taught by Prof. Lee Rudolph. He was as passionate about mathematics as one gets. Every class he filled 4 chalk boards with equations, as well as his chin and forehead from when he would step back and ponder where a missing term had gone. At then end of the semester we had a study party for the class final, and we invited him. He not only showed up, but also had a beer or two and showed us how to do the questions on the exam for the following morning.

    I have to admit I did not get much joy out of my grad classes, since that time in my life was exceedingly stressful even for grad school standards. A fun class might have been Electro. & Mag. Dynamics, but that is mostly due to weekend homework sessions with classmates that I enjoyed. For a while we meet at Borders and did the homework together in the cafe. You get a lot of interesting looks from the people in store when a small group of people are arguing over canceling terms and charge distributions. Eventually we just worked on a table in the lab, since we disturbed fewer people that way.

15. anon on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:55 am

    Undergrad: the several week section on Dante of a Great Books class that was guest taught by Ralph Williams at Michigan. He had all the requisite crazy enthusiam & passion to make me get up and go to an across-campus class at 8am.

    Grad: Sean’s cosmology class, especially since I took it later on in grad school so I already knew some stuff but it filled in a bunch of holes… and with the right amount of work to make you actually work but not so much to hate it. (And of course, the enthusiasm goes without saying here).

16. Blake Stacey on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:57 am

    String theory for undergraduates, with Barton Zwiebach and Jeffrey Goldstone; statistical physics for graduates, with Mehran Kardar; environmental politics and policy, with the late and much lamented Stephen Meyer.

17. Sam Gralla on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:57 am

    “International ideas and institutions” with Charles Hill at Yale. At the time, this was his pet class, for third-year international studies concentrators, but for anyone if you just asked (a secret, though, to keep the class small). At the beginning of each lecture was a q&a section where we asked him stuff about the news and he gave his take, often beginning with, “I called [top republican administration contact x] to ask him about this yesterday, and he said…”. The answer usually involved some theme and/or reading we had discussed in class, and it always came up in a natural way–not contrived at all. As more and more questions got satisfying answers this way, it just became obvious that the best way to understand the world was with constant reference to history and in particular the history of ideas. Our readings consisted of snippets from all the important authors in moral, legal, and political theory, organized in to weekly themes like sovereignty, balance of power, diplomacy, revolution, etc.. Hill identified the beginning of the modern world with the peace of Westfalia in 1648, with the establishment of the modern system of statehood in light of Hugo Grotius’ (1625) notions of sovereignty and his just war theory (analyzing when war is, and is not, moral). One of the central issues here is in what cases a preemptive war is justified. Bingo! Bush had just invaded Iraq (preemptively), and it was really fun (and enlightening) to employ Grotius’ framework in discussing this.

    Assignments for this class were short (1 or at most 2 page essays). Hill always said that when you go in to the real world (i.e., government) you have to keep things to one page or your superior won’t read them. But, you also have to stay grounded in the big ideas in order to have done the right analysis. So, you have to do an academic analysis, but keep it short and snappy (and unpretentious). That was a great exercise and the topics were fun. Sometimes he took newspaper articles and asked us to both summarize and analyze them in a page. I remember in particular when the united states intercepted a shipment of missiles to Yemen. What should our response be? Sometimes he made up news events, like in the following assignment, which appeared on an in-class midterm.

    This morning, Quebec announced that it was succeeding from the Canada. The Canadian government has responded that it does not recognize this succession. You are asked to prepare an immediate response from the UN. Do so in three sentences, drawing on themes from the class.

    Hill also had some ideas some found crazy. For example, he blamed the failure of the CIA in the last few years on a kind of “affirmative action for states” they now employ in recruiting. In the past, the CIA got most of its agents/analysts from Yale (and a few other schools, but mostly Yale). Thus, everybody involved had the kind of education he was now giving you (he said). Nowadays, the CIA has to get some people from all states, to make the senators happy (he said), and the people recruited just don’t have the kind of grounding in international ideas and institutions that they should. I thought this was a little silly back then, but thinking back on it, maybe he is right. At least, through my nostalgia-tinted goggles, it seems so.

    What a great class

18. Sam Gralla on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:58 am

    Of course, it was a close call with “Introduction to Cosmology” from Sean Carroll!

    

19. B on Aug 20th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    Two-way communication. I’ve always preferred those classes where the prof wasn’t just doing his thing, but made an effort to get in touch with the students.

    One can overdo enthusiasm. I’ve known a prof who was so enthusiastic he couldn’t stick with one topic, but always jumped ahead because it’s so great there is a connection to … and we find this also in… and … He was very popular with the students but they hardly learned anything.

20. Moshe on Aug 20th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    Not sure it was my favorite, but one of the more unusual undergraduate classes I took was Yakir Aharonov’s “Famous Paradoxes in Physics”. I could swear he never prepared class, every session started with a long silence while he tried to come up with something to talk about. He always succeeded brilliantly…the format of the class was simple- he presented the paradox, then we had to try to come up with solutions. Lots of fun.

21. Sean on Aug 20th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

    Believe it or not, I was not fishing for people to mention my own classes. But thanks!

22. Grad Student on Aug 20th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    At Princeton: Dan Marlow’s undergraduate classical mechanics class, and Paul Steinhardt’s graduate cosmology class.

    At MIT: Bob Jaffe’s graduate QM sequence.

23. ike on Aug 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    Probably the best course ever would be a calculus series taught by a lecturer who, besides being an accomplished mathematician, was also an excellent artist and could rapidly sketch all manner of differential forms, vector projections and the like. (His name was Richard Mitchell). I was so struck that I took every course he offered, and as a result was introduced to the notion of differential forms in electromagnetic theory, something I otherwise would never have learned about.

    Note to college students: When you find a really good teacher in your undergraduate career, it’s not a bad idea to take every class that teacher offers! It’s not to surprising to find that the best courses are often taught by lecturers, who don’t have to juggle research, advising graduate students, and teaching undergraduate courses (although a few exceptional individuals manage to do that quite well).

    University administrators would do well to acknowledge the important role that lecturers play.

24. Sean on Aug 20th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    I second the motion that, if you find a really good professor, you should take as many of their classes as you can. You’ll often learn more than by sticking more conventionally with the courses you are “supposed” to take.

25. mgary on Aug 20th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    My best physics class would have to be graduate Quantum Mechanics with Hitoshi Murayama. The lectures were always exciting and somewhat interactive (he was clearly very enthusiastic about the material) and the homework problems were always interesting and relevant to actual physical questions. Also, use of Mathematica or other computer tools was encouraged and at times required, which really helped me to learn a tool which has become indispensable in research. The course website is actually still online here and here.

26. mollishka on Aug 20th, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    Like #22, my favorite “relevant” (i.e., in major) class was the QM class I had with Bob Jaffe—a fantastic lecturer. I was also lucky enough to have an enthusiastic recitation instructor (Michael Forbes), rather than an unnamed depressingly boring one. This is the semester where Dirac notation is introduced for real, and when I took it, it was really well done, and like Sean says: I had to work hard for it, but I had fun and could tell I was actually learning instead of doing pure “busy work.”

    I think my favorite classes of all time, though, were the Algebra classes taught by The Man himself, Mike Artin. The material was simply gorgeous, Artin is the most enthusiastic lecturer I’ve ever encountered (there were some memorable moments second semester when he was literally too excited to talk), and he was very supportive of the non-mathematicians in his class.

27. Count Iblis on Aug 20th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    Only the seminars were interesting. I didn’t attend most lectures, only the problem sessions from time to time.

28. Harold on Aug 20th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    My class is the same as mgary’s. I took the same course but 2 years later. Hitoshi Murayama taught the first part of graduate quantum mechanics and lectured with an excellent flow and enthusiasm. His homework was very tough (although I’ve heard the teacher that taught the next part was tougher), but I felt very accomplished to struggle through the sets. I also learned a great deal of mathematica. These seem to hit spot on with Sean’s general two features that make a great course.

    Hitoshi still pops up frequently on the web with general lectures on ATLAS. While reading the slides, I try to replay in my mind the way he’d lecture them. (On an unrelated note, I’ve never caught him laughing before!)

29. Paul Wright on Aug 20th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    @Martin (number 4): Was that David Mackay’s course at Cambridge, by any chance? I think that was one of my favourites too. The lecturer was bright, enthusiastic and conveyed his content with precision, and the topic was fascinating too. You can see him giving a talk to Google on Dasher.

30. Jonathan Vos Post on Aug 20th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

    Re: #11 by Elliot.

    Not really a coincidence.

    To excerpt from Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_B._Leighton

    Robert B. Leighton (September 10, 1919–March 9, 1997) was an American physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology. His bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees were all from Caltech; he joined the faculty in 1949. His Principles of Modern Physics 1959 was a standard textbook. After Richard Feynman’s Lectures in Physics course, in the early-1960s, Leighton spent over two years reworking the tape-recorded text into publishable form: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which were published in 1964 and 1966, and which have enjoyed perennial success ever since…. Leighton retired from teaching in 1990…. One of his sons, Ralph Leighton, also collaborated with Feynman on several books.

31. Jeff on Aug 20th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

    Sean,

    I just took Nick’s GR class this spring. We used your book and his old handwritten notes, both of which were great. But it was the lectures which were truly remarkable…incredibly fast-paced, but just slow enough that you could follow, on a good day. I was particularly impressed with the ease with which the mathematics was introduced, explained, and incorporated. I am in complete agreement that his course was the best science class I have ever taken…but not the best class in general.

    I took one course taught by Jim Kincaid about the breakdown of common sense. Though not as intellecutally challenging as GR was, this course somehow managed to change my entire outlook on the world. I think that, in general, science courses don’t allow for this type of far-reaching influence. They are too concerned with specifics, and, while undeniably interesting and important, can’t have a broad impact on a person’s philosophy. Taken as a whole, an education in science can surely have a remarkable influence on somebody’s worldview, but I think that a single course rarely has this ability.

32. Eugene on Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:13 pm

    Unfortunately I was too far advanced into my graduate school years to take Sean’s legendary class (I did sneakily try…). But I did get a chance to take Sean’s GR class, which was a lot of fun, though I have already learned some of the material on my own so the gee-whiz factor was not there.

    In terms of making the biggest impression on me, the best class in grad school I took was Scott Dodelson’s Radiative Transfer in Astrophysics class. If you think E+M is boring, it’s because of the evil known as Jackson. Scott made E+M as fun as you could get. He has a very physical style, focusing more on gaining intuition then the dreary derivation of equations line-by-line. I still refer to my old notes that I took in his class once in a while (especially when I read ApJ papers.)

33. Philip Downey on Aug 21st, 2007 at 7:59 am

    I enjoyed pathology in my fourth year of undergrad most of all. It was taught by a different professor each week, so you got an expert on the subject - cancer, infections, inflammation or whatever. It was also good because it brought together nearly everything that was boring and required in third year and showed how they all come together.

    Going to a real autopsy was pretty wicked too. Whole new meaning to a ‘wet’ lab.

34. Fermi-Walker Public Transport on Aug 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    As an undergraduate, the course that sticks out was Theo Ruiz’s course on Medieval History. When I came to the first lecture, the lights were off in the lecture hall. Suddenly, we hear Gregorian chanting, followed by Theo Ruiz himself dressed as a monk with a large candle. What an entrance. Years
    later I ran into him and he was surprised I became a scientist.

    As a gradute student, Sasha Kashlinsky gave an amazing series of lectures about
    various topics in astrophysics. I almost remember word for word the one he gave about the negative heat capacity of gravity and its consequences.

35. Yvette on Aug 21st, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    Perhaps I’m not a good student, but the classes I remember best are the ones where we laughed a lot- I guess I’m a class clown of sorts. I mean honestly now, how would I ever be able to forget my computational methods in physics class where we got the professor into such fits of laughter that he fell onto the floor behind his podium? Or the thermodynamics class on Halloween when we did a pumpkin seed eating game based on the professor’s mannerisms? (”prof references equation that isn’t there= 5 seeds”, “prof mentions he’ll be at a faraway conference on friday= 10 seeds”)

    Though ok, from a more academic, sterile viewpoint I guess the class that I remember best and influenced my life the most was freshman kinematics. I had my first-ever “this is so friggin cool, I am going to jump up and down from excitement” moment there, the professor was so enthusiastic about physics that I ended up working for him in his lab based on that alone, and it essentially made me a physics major.

36. efp on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Complex Analysis, delivered by Dr. Alexander Its at Clarkson University around 1992 or so. I think I saw someone else mention a Complex Analysis course. The material is… stunning. But Its, with his thick Russian accent, was also amazing.

    He would begin lecturing as soon as his body broke the plain of the doorway. No notes. Ever. Armed only with a piece of chalk he would conduct us through long, treacherous & profound theorems like a symphony, with every epsilon and delta in its perfect place. After the final exam, I was ready to tackle the Riemann hypothesis, but I was distracted by this girl…

37. Charon on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 2:06 am

    Enthusiasm is key, a passion for explanation, caring about the students learning. Two quarters of undergrad quantum at the University of Chicago demonstrated this for me. The first quarter was awful - horrible book, wretched teacher, I didn’t learn anything and got the lowest grade I’ve ever had. Second quarter we used the same damn book, but the teacher (David Grier) was outstanding, and I managed to learn the two quarters of QM in one.

    And Sean’s undergrad GR course was awesome. Especially for being the first time through (at the U of C, at least). Such a pity my alma mater lost him.

    While we’re on the U of C, I have to concur with the above mention of Paul Sally. Amazing teacher. I actually threw away the textbook after the class (not Rudin, don’t remember the author) and LaTeX’d my notes to make my own real analysis book.

    One thing I found in grad school is I enjoyed the astronomy classes vastly more than the physics classes, despite a wide variety of teachers in both. The astronomy faculty treated the grad students as colleagues - junior colleagues, to be sure, but colleagues nonetheless. The physics faculty treated us like boot camp recruits. Makes a world of difference.

    And I’ll just say, what a pity is it when a brilliant researcher can’t teach to save his life. Bardeen, Bardeen…

38. TomC on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 10:09 am

    I’ll echo Eugene in voting for Any Class By Scott Dodelson at the grad level.

    But the most important, influential, and really really fun class I’ve ever had was a Physics/Philosophy cross-listed undergrad course on the QM measurement problem, taught by David Albert at Columbia. I took it as a German Lit major and it drove me right back into science, where I happily live today.

39. A.J. on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 11:17 am

    Best instructor I ever had was a high school mathematics teacher named Josh Abrams. He taught all mathematics as applied mathematics, and let his students work on computational projects until they started to see the theory and abstractions for themselves. (My favorite example: He taught calculus backwards. It began with numerical solutions of differential equations, moved on to Riemann sums, then to limits, then to integration, then differentiation.)

    A close second was UChicago’s Honors Analysis sequence, which was taught by Rhagavan Narasimhan when I took it. Narasimhan covered analysis on metric spaces, basic operator algebra, complex analysis, and differential forms and elementary differential topology in the space of a year. Every class I’ve taken since has been easy by comparison.

40. cynic on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm

    An undergraduate quantum mechanics course that started with “consider a particle, or should that be a particle and a peep”. And when it came to being flash, Professor B. was ambidextrous and so could crack a lengthy equation across a black board without pausing for breath. (He did this infrequently, so that one only realised later what had happened.) I’m sure he is too modest to have me mention him by name, but I will always remember him.

41. Ron on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    In the undergraduate low temperature lab, small groups collaborated to reproduce classic experiments at liquid helium temperature. Over the term, we designed them on paper, built them in the machine shop, nursed the dewars as they cooled down, attempted to collect data, warmed up and rebuilt the apparatus when it didn’t work the first time, then tried again. (Who knew that ordinary solder joints don’t survive at 2K? We were undergraduates.) The professor had just started at Stanford and was awaiting construction of his lab, giving him an inordinate amount of time to devote to teaching. He loaned us equipment shipped from his old lab since he wasn’t using it yet. He’d worked in low temperature experiments for years at Bell Labs and later received the Nobel. He told great stories about what it is to be a working experimental physicist and spent a lot of time with us in the machine shop and in the lab. (Of course, this was one of those classes that consumed all waking and sleeping hours. Ironically, it was a two-unit course. When the University attempted to encourage more breadth of study by putting a limit on the number of units department can demand for a major, the physics department changed all the 5-unit classes to 3-unit classes, but was still one over the limit. In a wry joke, this lab was dropped a unit to make up the difference.) Best. Class. Ever.

42. Trinifar on Aug 23rd, 2007 at 2:37 am

    This may seem pretentious for being overly humble, but it’s not meant that way.

    Remedial Writing, given as a summer course at Ithaca College by Prof. Barb Adams. I was a 17-year old kid so eager to get into college that I jumped in four days after graduating from high school and took what classes I could find in the summer offering (which meant finding ones which had no prerequisits). This one was a real gem. Four students and a braless, feminist professor who raised goats (this was early 1970’s) to make goat cheese, knew her stuff, and cared about teaching. She was also willing to hang out after class and talk about most anything. I learned more useful things about writing (and reading) in that single condensed 6-week class than in anything before or since.

    Why was it effective? No pressure from the teacher, just help. All of us students were there because we really wanted to learn. Lot’s of in-class practice — write for 5 or 15 minutes, read out loud, listen to constructive feedback from the others — not much lecutre, lots of good reading assignments. The 4:1 ratio was a huge plus. I remember much laughter and some real tear-jerking moments.

    Heck, that was more than 30 years ago and comes to mind like yesterday.

43. Dave S on Aug 23rd, 2007 at 11:08 am

    Three of us organized a fourth-year seminar course - read 50 seminal papers in one semester, and write a summary paper that doesn’t exist in the literature.

    Only half the class was in the leas tbit intimately familiar with the material to start with, but through implementing peer review throughout the year we all learned so much - no one was left behind.

    It was absolutely bonkers, and I’m surprised they let us do it. But everyone finished, and everyone loved the course!

44. Martin on Aug 24th, 2007 at 4:35 am

    @Paul (number 29) - Yes, it was indeed David Mackay’s course, and I second all your comments.

45. HL on Aug 24th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    Computer Science 61A: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, at UC Berkeley, 1989, taught by Brian Harvey, based on the text by Abelson and Sussman.

    “First, the professor was absolutely enthusiastic about the material; they weren’t just punching a clock, they were truly into it. Second, a very delicate balance was struck, in which the material was ultimately understandable (and interesting, it goes without saying), but also extremely challenging.”

46. JBW on Aug 24th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    Undergrad- Baraba Klinger - Films of the 1950s. Absolutely amazing course which opened my mind to numerous different ideas and modes of thinking.

    Tied for first - Murray McGibbon - Acting 2. Learned more in that class about life than any other class period.

    Grad School - Jeff Rush - Scene Analysis. Always chaotic, but always enjoyable. I can now carefully dissect structure in story and understand how a story really works.

47. Joe on Aug 30th, 2007 at 1:06 pm

    My experience with Philip Hugly at the University of Illinois was almost the same as Mike at #10 above, except I did not go on to become either a philosopher or mathematician. In conversations outside class, Hugly introduced me to Frege’s work in the foundations of mathematics and Cantor’s transfinite set theory. His commitment to finding the truth in enormously complicated things and generosity to a frankly knuckleheaded sophomore had a foundational impact on my intellectual development. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Professor Hugly for that semester in 1974.

    My personal low came in Real Analysis a few semesters later. I could not follow the professor in part of a proof he was doing at the board. As I sat formulating my question, the guy in front of me asked the question I wished to ask. Professor X turned, paused, and witheringly suggested, “If you don’t understand that, perhaps you should be in life sciences.” I closed my notebook, took a mental inventory of drink specials at various campus bars, and never returned to the class again.

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