[Tycho]

There were 20 or 25 of us. It's hard to say you don't understand when it's a really large group.

In A2 it was so much easier when there were only five of us.

What the best way to tackle this asymmetry? Teacher asks the class if they understand, students who need help stay quiet.

On a side note, I dropped advanced physics at highschool because it was incredibly boring. Spent ages drawing error bars on graphs, instead of learning about the laws of nature. It had always been my favourite subject up to that point.

[analog31]

Oh yeah, the error bars. As a physics teaching assistant in grad school, I was assigned to the freshman lab course, taught by a theoretician. The course was practically dominated by error bars, which were incredibly poorly explained, and taught in an almost doctrinaire way. That, and the equipment was so old and flaky that it produced nonsensical results.

The kids emerged from that course, convinced that physics is subjective.

They should decide whether they're teaching physics, or teaching experimentalism. The latter is valuable, but if so, it should be taught as such.

[DanBC]

One thing that people are trying is to just pick people to answer questions. They don't ask a question and let some one who wants to answer to answer it, they ask the question and them pick someone to answer it. This means you learn from the people who don't normally answer whether they understand or not and you understand where they don't understand.

It needs some shift of expectations. Not knowing the answer to a question is fine and being allowed to say, in fromt of a bunch of people, that you don't understand is a good thing.

[trentmb]

> One thing that people are trying is to just pick people to answer questions.

Had a professor for my analysis class that stated he'd never seen regular class attendance drop as quick as when he tried doing this.

As a slower student, I definitely had a tendency to skip these sort of classes and just go to office hours.

Just an amusing anecdote!

[ihnorton]

Isn't this one of the oldest educational strategies in the book? Or has it somehow gone out of favor? Nearly every education-related movie has a scene of the teacher specifically picking students to answer questions (often the slacker-protagonist).

[alasdair_]

This is the standard in any business school that teaches using the case method.

[keithpeter]

Current OFSTED wisdom centres around 'checks of learning'. Plus the fact that experienced teachers can read cues including facial expressions &c (sort of like Douglas Adams and deadlines, he liked the wooshing sound they made past his ears). When you have confused 10 out of 25 students, it sort of bounces off the ceiling and hits you in the mid-forehead if you have any sensitivity.

Plus homework (error analysis is really important).

PS: 'boring' is a problem. We don't push the error bars so much (upper and lower bounds and their impact on accuracy is a GCSE Maths Higher topic). Institute of Physicists in UK did a survey in 80s of members and concluded that most studied the subject at University despite 6th form work rather than because of it!