

What people or experiences influence your teaching?
I am constantly surprised by my students' insights and like to allow the class to move in directions based on their inquiry. Having rigid, inflexible plans would halt natural curiosity, so I'm a teacher who likes to respond authentically to my students.
How do you plan a lesson?
Funny you should ask - I have an unusual approach to this. I think a huge amount (in most cases I've been thinking for years) about the topic: its conceptual wrinkles, the different angles you can look at it from, the way it developed historically, and so on. I come up with a set of problems, questions, tasks that I think bring this out. But then I walk into the classroom and I put these things in front of the students - and I never really know in advance what happens next. I know the kinds of conceptual problems that are inherent to the material, but what may snag students on a given day depends on the specific people in the room, the way I happen to phrase a particular question, or even on the mood they're in, etc.
Anyhow, they react, and then I respond to that. I look for the point where their minds start to dig in, where they're surprised, where they disagree with one another, and I pull from that - and we go where that leads us. Sometimes, a disagreement in the room on a point that I thought was just a side-note will take up a great deal of time. And I always let that happen, because that's where the real intellectual engagement lies.
When you're teaching - especially a subject like physics, which can seem so simple, so straightforward, if you don't look too closely - it's easy to just glide through material, everyone nodding and dutifully writing things down. When that happens, no one's really thinking. No one's asking, “Wait, does this actually make sense?” In some sense, I think a lot of what I do is try to get kids into a state of doubt. If you never doubt an idea, you never really believe it. It just exists in this neutral mental category of “Things my teacher told me.” Nothing's happening on an intellectual level in that realm. My job is to get them away from that.
But don’t you need to teach particular content?
We always do get to the content, partly because I am guiding things, but also because the content is the natural content. If, say, you start asking questions about how things move, if you take those questions seriously and think rigorously, then the standard kinematics equations are the natural result of that thought process. You can’t end up anywhere else.
This sounds like a very meandering approach to curriculum.
On a day-to-day basis, there's a certain openness, definitely, a tendency to follow what might seem like tangents-- but they never really are. They always turn out to be the fastest way to the real conceptual core. And on a larger scale, there's a lot of structure - but it's the structure of a narrative, a story.
A story? Don’t you teach physics & math?
Math and physics can be and should be a story - in the sense of a clear development, from a conflict (a set of questions, puzzles, problems) to a resolution. There’s this notion out there that a math class is just a series of topics, one after the other - a list, basically. I find that disheartening. I try to make my courses follow a more or less continuous train of thought, a natural development of ideas. Often I struggle to figure out where to insert unit divisions, because to me each idea, each problem, each insight leads naturally to the next.
Interesting. Speaking of stories, what are you reading right now?
My wife and I have been reading the Bhagavad Gita (the great work of Sanskrit wisdom literature) together in sections for the past few weeks. I also recently picked up Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, which I read five years ago and loved and have been meaning to reread ever since. Magic Mountain is 800 pages about people living in a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps, mostly eating, talking, taking walks, so it might not sound like something you'd want to reread, but it casts a weird spell. When I read it the first time, I never wanted it to stop.
Read more about Mr. Bean here.