psychology undergrad schools

bclintonk
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:12:48 +0000

^ Fair point. This is going back into ancient history, but in my undergrad days at Michigan the worst class I ever had by far was an Honors Calculus class taught by a tenured full professor. The guy was a native English speaker, but he just couldn’t speak about math in any “verbal” language. He only spoke pure math. He’d “lecture” by writing out a long proof on the board–it might take 10 minutes—and then at the end he’d utter the magic words, “QED. Everyone see?” If anyone didn’t see or had any kind of question, he’d turn to the board, erase what was there and commence writing out another long proof, or the same one all over again. Disaster. But he was a brilliant, world-class mathematician working at the cutting edge of mathematical research. Probably very good at supervising Ph.D. dissertations, and perhaps even good in advanced math seminars with others who spoke his peculiar form of math-only language. Terrible choice for a freshman calculus class, even with Honors Program students. They thought they were doing us a favor by giving us a top scholar in a small class of Honors students. We’d probably have been better off with a brand new Assistant Professor or even a good TA who was still grounded enough in the non-mathematical world to communicate using a “verbal” language that we non-mathematicians could understand.

Would this guy have been hired at an LAC? Maybe not. But then neither, I wager, would John Rawls (Harvard), arguably the most influential philosopher of the latter half of the twentieth century, who was a terrible lecturer, mumbly, vague, often quite inarticulate but an absolutely brilliant thinker. Or Saul Kripke (Princeton) who revolutionized the fields of logic and philosophy of language but couldn’t lecture or lead a discussion worth a tinker’s dam. Yet I feel privileged to have yhad the opportunity to study with them at various times.

All my other Honors classes at Michigan, by the way, were outstanding.