Preliminaries 7
is basically sedentary – you’re still just sitting there while somebody or somethingelsemakes it all
happen in your brain while you aren’tdoingmuch of anything. At best it grabs your attention a bit
better (on average) than lecture, butyouare mentallypassive.
In all of these forms of learning, the single active thing you are likely to be doing is taking notes
or moving an eye muscle from time to time. For better or worse, the human brain isn’t designed
to learn well in passive mode. Parts of your brain are likely to take charge and pull your eyes
irresistably to the window to look outside whereactivethings are going on, things that might not
be so damnboring!
With your active engagement, with your taking charge of and participating in the learning
process, things change dramatically. Instead of passively listeningin lecture, you can at leasttryto
ask questions and initiate discussions whenever an idea is presentedthat makes no intial sense to you.
Discussion is anactiveprocess even if you aren’t the one talking at the time.You participate!Even
a tiny bit of participation in a classroom setting where students are constantly asking questions,
where the instructor is constantly answering them and asking the students questions in turn makes
a huge difference. Humans being social creatures, it also makes theclass a lot more fun!
In summary, sitting on your ass^1 and writing meaningless (to you, so far) things down as some-
body says them in the hopes of being able to “study” them and discover their meaning on your own
later isboringand for most students, later never comes because you are busy withmanyclasses,
because you haven’t discovered anything beautiful or exciting (which is therewardfor figuring it
all out – if you ever get there) and then there is partying and hanging out with friends and having
fun. Even if you do find the time and really want to succeed, in a complicated subject like physics
you are less likely to beableto discover the meaning on your own (unless you areso brightthat
learning methodology is irrelevant and you learn in a single pass no matter what). Most introduc-
tory students are swamped by the details, and have small chance of discovering thepatternswithin
those details that constitute “making sense” and make the detailedinformationmuch, much easier
to learnby enabling a compression of the detail into a much smaller set of connected ideas.
Articulation of ideas, whether it is to yourself or to others in a discussion setting,requiresyou
to create tentative patterns that might describe and organize allthe details you are being presented
with. Using those patterns and applying them to the details as they are presented, you naturally
encounter places where your tentative patterns are wrong, or don’t quite work, where something
“doesn’t make sense”. In an “active” lecture students participate in the process, and can ask
questions and kick ideas around until theydomake sense. Participation is alsofunand helps you
pay far more attention to what’s going on than when you are in passive mode. It may be that
this increased attention, this consideration of many alternatives and rejecting some while retaining
others with social reinforcement, is what makes all the difference.To learn optimally, even “seeing”
must be an active process, one where you are not a vessel waiting to be filled through your eyes
but rather part of a team studying a puzzle and looking for the patternstogetherthat will help you
eventually solve it.
Learning is increased still further bydoing, the very essence of activity and engagement. “Doing”
varies from course to course, depending on just what there is foryou to do, but it always is the
applicationof what you are learning to some sort of activity, exercise, problem. It isnotjust a
recapitulation of symbols: “looking over your notes” or “(re)reading the text”. The symbols for any
given course of study (in a physics class, they very likely willbealgebraic symbols for real although
I’m speaking more generally here) do not, initially, mean a lot to you. IfI writeF~=q(~v×B~) on
the board, it means a great deal tome, but if you are taking this course for the first time it probably
means zilch toyou, and yet I pop it up there, draw some pictures, make some noises that hopefully
make sense to you at the time, and blow on by. Later you read it in your notes to try to recreate
that sense, but you’veforgottenmost of it. Am I describing the income I expect to make sellingB~
(^1) I mean, of course, your donkey. What did you think I meant?