On Teaching (1979-1979)

 "By showing us the extreme diversity of the factors involved in scientific creativity, the history of science teaches us that we should open the doors of our laboratories more widely. If we put that lesson into practice, our reflection on the past will have had a beneficial effect on the future." (Jean Rostand, "Humanly Possible: A Biologist’s Note on the Future of Mankind", 1970)

"Many teachers and textbook writers have never recognized the power of sheer intellectual curiosity as a motive for the highest type of work in mathematics, and as a consequence they have failed to organize and present the work in a manner designed to stimulate the student’s interest through a challenge to his curiosity." (Charles H Butler & F Lynwood Wren, "The Teaching of Secondary Mathematics" 5th Ed., 1970)

"Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing." (Alfred Adler, "Mathematics and Creativity", New Yorker Magazine, 1972) 

"There are two subcategories of holist called irredundant holists and redundant holists. Students of both types image an entire system of facts or principles. Though an irredundant holist's image is rightly interconnected, it contains only relevant and essential constitents. In contrast, redundant holists entertain images that contain logically irrelevant or overspecific material, commonly derived from data used to 'enrich' the curriculum, and these students embed the salient facts and principles in a network of redundant items. Though logically irrelevant, the items in question are of great psychological importance to a 'redundant holist', since he uses them to access, retain and manipulate whatever he was originally required to learn." (Gordon Pask, "Learning Strategies and Individual Competence", 1972)

"A professor’s enthusiasm for teaching introductory courses varies inversely with the likelihood of his having to do it." (Thomas L Martin Jr, "Malice in Blunderland", 1973)

"Small wonder that students have trouble [with statistical hypothesis testing]. They may be trying to think." (W Edwards Deming, "On probability as a basis for action", American Statistician 29, 1975)

"We don’t teach our students enough of the intellectual content of experiments - their novelty and their capacity for opening new fields. [...] My own view is that you take these things personally. You do an experiment because your own philosophy makes you want to know the result. It’s too hard, and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said it’s important. You must feel the thing yourself [...]" (Isidor Isaac Rabi, The New Yorker Magazine, October 13, 1975)

"I would [...] urge that people be introduced to [chaos] early in their mathematical education. [Chaos] can be studied phenomenologically by iterating it on a calculator, or even by hand. Its study does not involve as much conceptual sophistication as does elementary calculus. Such study would greatly enrich the student's intuition. Not only in research, but also in the everyday world of politics and economics, we would all be better off if more people realised that simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties." (Robert May, "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics", Nature 26(5560), 1976)