Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - This New Method of Teaching Physics Changes EVERYTHING! w/ Eric Mazur [Ep. 428]

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Imagine walking into a classroom where the students are the ones driving the discussion. Where curiosity and collaboration have replaced rote memorization. A place where traditional education has been turned on its head, and the power of learning is placed directly in the hands of those who seek it. It's almost hard to imagine such a classroom after having studied in our current education system, right? But today’s guest on Into the Impossible has turned this unlikely fantasy into a reality by developing an active learning system that engages students rather than just lecturing them.  Meet Eric Mazur, physicist, educator, and mastermind behind peer instruction. Eric is a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard University, and today, he’s here to discuss the past, present, and future of our education system.  Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:02 What is peer instruction?  10:54 Are professors necessary in the classroom?  17:37 Are lectures an effective way to teach?  23:39 Using technology in the classroom  28:11 Hiring good teachers and professors  31:41 The problem with grading 36:56 Tenure system in academia 41:36 Which subjects would Eric make compulsory   44:41 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Eric Mazur: 💻 Website: http://ericmazur.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/eric_mazur/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine walking into a classroom where the students are the ones driving the discussion, where curiosity and collaboration have replaced rote memorization, a place where traditional education has been turned on its head, and the power of learning is placed directly in the hands of those who seek it. Today's guest on Into the Impossible has turned this fantasy into a reality. Meet the one and only Eric Mazur, A pioneer whose radical approach to education is not only changing the way we learn, but also the way we think, collaborate, and succeed. In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the past, present, and future of education with an emphasis on peer instruction and artificial intelligence.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. So let's go right into it and talk about peer instruction. I am going to be teaching a cosmology class, which I've taught on and off for 20 years as a professor here at UC San Diego. And I've never felt I've done a great job. I get decent reviews. But I always feel like it could be better. I always leave feeling I'm disappointed. I've failed. And I always, you know, think back that really education hasn't changed much in a thousand years. And so how does peer instruction, you know, potentially provide a benefit for educators like me and for the students that are listening. We have hundreds of thousands of students that listen to this podcast. So how can peer instruction help me and help them? Well, maybe we should first explain what peer instruction is because I'm not assuming that everybody knows, right? My background is not very

dissimilar to yours. When I joined the faculty here 40 years ago, believe it or not, and I was asked to teach the large intrafysics course, I didn't know any, better than lecturing. I had been lectured and I sort of very naively assumed, oh, you know, that's how I learned physics and that's how I will teach. The question about how I should teach didn't even come up in my mind. And to make matters worse, even though I think deep down, I knew that the lecture wasn't working. I'll come back to that in just a second. The feedback I was receiving was extremely positive. I got high evaluations for my lectures. The students passed difficult exams. So that only reinforced this misconception that we learn by lecturing. Now, I mean back up for a moment,

when I was a beginning student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, I wanted to become an astronomer. And I enrolled in the large astronomy, introductory astronomy course. And, you know, it was in six weeks, I decided astronomy is not for me. And in part it was actually because of the lecturing, which was deadening and you know, which was essentially reciting

facts rather than really thinking about the beauty of astronomy. But then when I started teaching, I'd forgotten all of that, you know, and I did it to my students. And it wasn't until the early 1990s, actually 1990, exactly,

after having taught for six years, that I discovered that my award-winning teaching, quote-unquote, was really not accomplishing anything. I gave my students a pre-test and then a post-test to look at how they would answer some daily life questions about Newton's laws. So no equations, nothing. It really was asking just in words about the interpretation.

In fact, when I'd read the test, I thought this is too simple for my class. But then I saw that people had collected data that showed that students didn't learn anything. So I went, no way, that's not going to be true in my class. And then I gave it to my class. And one of the very first things that happened was that one student raised her hand,

and she asked me, Professor Mazurra, how should I answer these questions, according to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things? I was totally flabbergasted. I just had no, I had no, I didn't even understand the question, so to speak. I didn't know how to answer it.

And by the time the test had been completed, it was clear that, yes, my students liked my lectures, and yes, they passed exams, but they had not even internalized the most basic concepts, Newton's law. They were still Aristotelian thinkers. So that gave me pause. And, you know, to make a very long story short, sort of by accident, I discovered,

in spite of literature that has pointed this out for many, many years, that rather than teaching by telling, what we should really do is teaching by questioning. Because education is not just the transfer of information. Before Gutenberg, or maybe before the Industrial Revolution, you know, when books were not a commodity, the only way to transfer information from one generation to the next was through the lecture.

In fact, the word lecture means a read-eastern, ironically. But now we live in an information age, so information is ubiquitous, so why do we force students to come to a theater-like auditorium to sort of listen to the professor, read the textbook to them? You're not going to learn to play the piano by going to concert hall listening to a famous pianist playing the piano. You've got to roll up your sleeves and play the piano. Or you're not going to learn, you know, to become a chef by watching, you know, chef's table on Netflix. You've got to actually be in the kitchen and roll up your sleeve and cook. Same for physics. Watching a professor talk about physics is not going to make you a physicist. You've got to roll up

your sleeves or in this case really use your brain and think like a physicist. So I thought, you know what, in class up to now, I've really been focusing on this first step of education, which is information transfer. And then I left a more important second. part, making sense of that information to my students, we should really flip that around. So in 1990, I came up, I didn't call it the flipped classroom, was the idea of flipping that around, telling my students, read my notes, read the textbook, and then in class, I'm going to help uncover misconceptions you have about this by asking, by basically teaching you to questioning rather than telling.

Nothing new, of course, because Socrates already said we should teach by questioning. So the way I do it is I ask a question and I try to ask the question so that the challenge is about half of the students. I want no more than 70% desired answers and no more than 30% undesired. I say desired and undesired rather than correct, incorrect because there might be people who are in the humanities orders where the word correct is not as applicable as it is in the sciences. So I have them commit to an answer.

I don't use technology because I find the technology distraction. I simply have the students put their hand on their chest indicating their choice or write their answer down on a little piece of paper. Either way it's fine. So if it's a multiple choice question, I can use one finger, two fingers, three fingers, four or five. I try to limit it to five choices. And I tell them you all have to put your hand on your chest at the same time showing which

choice you've made with your fingers. And I tell them that if they don't do that, I will come to them, put the microphone in their face and they have to tell the whole room. So they quickly slapped their hands on their finger on their chest. Then after they've committed to an answer, I say, now find a person around you who has a different answer and try to convince that person that you are right and he or she is wrong. Chaos erupts, okay? Students stand up because they can't find somebody who has a different opinion right around them. start talking. I mean, I frequently teach classes who was up to 200 people. Everybody starts talking.

The interesting thing that happens is that very quickly, the students zoom in on the answer that I want them to focus on. And in the beginning, I was really surprised about that. But imagine you have two students next to each other, John and Mary. Mary has the right answer because she gets it. John does not. On average, Mary is more likely to convince John than the other way around. That's, you know, the sort of power of logic, if you want. But that's not the important point. The important point of pre-instruction is this.

Mary is more likely to convince John than Professor Mazur because she has only recently learned it. She's still, she's not, you know, affected by what Stephen Pink calls the curse of knowledge, or Susan Ambrose calls the expert blind spot. She understands what John's difficulties are. Professor Mazurz taught it so many times, has understood it so long ago that he no longer remembers the difficulties that the beginning learner has.

When I saw that, I thought, wow, I have to do this every time in my class. So essentially, they talk to each other, convince each other, I pulled them again, and if the initial you know, number of, or percentage of correct answers is between 30 and 70 percent. It's not unlikely to go to 100 percent. And then wrap up with an explanation, either from the students or from me. And then the cycle repeats until class time is up.

And by now, you know, if you go to Google Scholar and you type in peer instruction, you'll find thousands of papers of people who have collected data in different disciplines. I always have people come to me, how do you use peer instruction in art history? I don't know, I'm a physicist. I don't teach history, but you Google art history peer instruction or art history veterinary medicine, and wow, you know, you find articles on it. So that's in a nutshell what peer instruction is, and I think I touched upon the point of why it works for the students. It works for the students because they get an explanation in their own term.

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. I love that way of thinking about it, but at the same time, I feel threatened, Eric, because I'm looking up Harvard's tuition. It's $57,261. It's outpacing inflation over time. And this is on the sophy.com website. So it has to be true. It's got up a factor of more than double, actually it's got up triple since you began teaching, double since I began teaching. And UC San Diego's not that much difference. I don't mean to pick on you. But I know you can handle it. But why do we need professors? If there's just a book, I can get, I had Barbara Ryden on an eminent cosmologist at the Ohio State University. She's a better writer than I am, a textbook author than I am.

And why not just have them and have a student and have, just have the students teach each other, have them read in advance and maybe do some problems during class. And then why do we need to pay my exorbitant salary to charge, you know, the equivalent of a Harvard tuition as well. What's, make the case for the status quo, if you will, of having professors as necessary ingredients in the classroom. Well, I am, I'm not sure I'm going to make the, the case. First of all, first of all, I don't set the tuition, so. I know.

But, but I think, and we all know this, for really very highly self-motivated students, you don't need a professor. You don't need a formal class setting. And in fact, look, you and I, when we finished college and went on or finished graduate school, given that we both became professors, that was not when learning stopped. It continued. You and I continued to learn every day.

And we do that not with a professor. We do this because we're intrinsically motivated to learn. And we do it with probably even more satisfaction. than we did when we were students. So I think for the most highly motivated students, definitely not necessary to have a professor. In fact, you know, let's think about it. Some of, I'm going to mention two of our very successful alumni,

both dropouts, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. They had better things to do than sit in the class and listening to their professor. They decided early on that they were onto something that was much bigger than what they could possibly learn in their classes. That doesn't mean that this is going to work for everybody. In fact, we know it doesn't work for everybody. However, I think we really are at a turning point in education

with what is happening right now in terms of access to information through Google, which sort of makes the lowest level blooms taxonomy, remembering almost unnecessary. And now there's an even bigger threat of generative AI, which is really encroaching on all of the other levels of Bloom's taxonomy. So I think we really need to have a discussion in higher education, what the value is of higher education in the age of generative AI. I think there are three things that we need to realize.

One is the introduction of any new technology obviates certain skills. I remember when the graphic calculator come up, people were in arms about students using graphing calculators in class and even worse on examinations. Now we don't think about that anymore because people would lose the skill of plotting data by hand. Who cares about that now? Or, you know, when the HP35 calculator came out in 1972, which is when we're when I went to college, people were horrified that the skill of using slide rules and logarithm tables would be lost.

And so each time that there's technology, there's a discussion about do we isolate the students from this technology or do we have them use it? And usually the knee-jerk reaction of most academic is we need to cut them off from it. And we see the same thing now with generative AI. So one, new technology, certain skills atrophy. Two, new technology affects how we assess people. But three, and this is particularly important now, is new technology generally affects productivity and jobs. So for example, generative AI is not affecting blue-collar jobs. It's affecting the jobs of our

graduates. And just as robots have eliminated blue-collar jobs, so, you know, signs are already emerging that Gentive AI is eliminating the jobs of our future graduates. And that is going to have a huge impact on us. So I think we really need to rethink the purpose of our education and the role of the professor in the classroom. I see myself as rather than the same, the sage on the stage as sort of the guide on the side, the coach. Right? And think about it, right? I mean, most other things you learn and you're coached for, it's not the coach doing the work.

The coach is letting you do the work. As a professor, especially in the old-fashioned medieval approach of teaching that you refer to earlier on, it's the professor doing the work and the students sitting passively observing. I don't learn how to play soccer by watching, you know, soccer games on TV. I have to do. You learn by doing. Learning is not a spectator sport. Hey there.

Students of the impossible professor Brian Keating here. I know this is a bit old-fashioned, but I have a tiny little homework assignment for you. And that is to make sure you're subscribed to my YouTube channel and follow the show on your preferred streaming platform. So take a moment to hit that subscribe or follow button if you haven't already done so. And for some extra credit, like the episode and leave a comment. Thanks a bunch. Now let's get back to my interview with the one and only Eric Mazur.

Look at the etymology of the word education. And, you know, originally I thought it meant, yes. We always think of it of dumping into it. you know, forcing knowledge from my brain to their brains using, you know, the chalkboard and the pencil or the computer now is more likely. But in reality, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, has to transform. I mean, I do feel like, uh, our jobs were kind of miraculously saved in a way during COVID because during COVID, there wasn't even the opportunity to have, you know, in, in, in class, you know, students interacting with students, although I'm sure you figure it out ways to do it.

I wasn't clever enough to do that. So it was just a torture. On the other hand, we survived it. So what is the, you know, people always say, well, AI won't take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will take your job. But in reality, COVID kind of proved the opposite, like, or at least for professors like us, that our jobs are safe. They're going to be just the same as they were a thousand years ago in Bologna, Italy. And we just have to keep, you know, keep the, keep the juice flowing. because until people find out that, you know, why I learn from Brian Keating, you know,

when you can get a virtual Carl Sagan, we have every single word he ever said, every, every book he ever wrote, dump it into an LLM, and he could be up there and communicating and teaching him far better than me. So what do you make of the resiliency of our profession and surviving COVID? I thought that would be upheaval. I'm glad you mentioned it. I think at the beginning of COVID, I read this article by Nuval Harald in the Financial Times, he wrote, I forgot exactly what the title was.

It was something, the world after coronavirus. And the second paragraph actually mentions, it's mostly really about privacy issue at article, but the second paragraph mentions education. And he says, you know, in normal times, things like that are happening now would never have happened, like entire schools deciding to go online. I mean, no university, you know, board of overseers or trustees or whatever would ever have decided to take such a dramatic experiment. And he also says that emergency measures often tend to become permanent because they fast forward if you want history. So I remember the beginning of COVID thinking, wow, is this finally the turning point where education will get out?

out of the Middle Ages? We know the answer to that question. The answer is no. But I think the big difference between COVID and Genitive AI is COVID went away. Yes, COVID exposed the fatal flaws of lecturing. It became deadly. Students were alone.

Lectures were recorded. Why even go to the live lecture if you can watch the recording when it's more convenient for you, right? rather than for the professor. So, and then you're not only alone at home, you are totally alone because you cut off from everybody else. You're really isolated. So I think in a sense, COVID exposed, you know,

the fatal flaws in the lecture-based approach to education. However, you know, most people just sat through it. They bit the bullet and they continued. And luckily, you know, the remote year was only one year. And then we could go back. I think most people were thinking, I can't wait to get back in the classroom and do what it did before. And I think the reason for that, Brian, is that the lecture gives the perfect illusion of learning. Simulation, yes.

Because it gives the perfect illusion of learning, it gives the perfect illusion of teaching to the faculty members. So it cuts both ways. You know, let's go back to something else here, but it's related. you'll see the connection in a second. A number of years ago I was organizing the colloquium here. And I worked very hard on getting the, you know, more attendance to the colloquia, my colleagues to come and attend and I made nice posters and I advertise it and I made it a social thing.

And, you know, I pride myself in having invited quite a few interesting speakers. Each time I'd look around, and it were more students than colleagues, and a lot of colleagues who I wanted to see were not there. And I remember sitting to some colloquia that I thought were absolutely spectacular. And then, you know, half an hour later, I'm in the hallway of the lab, and I run into a colleague who I know has not attended the colloquium. I say, did you come to that colloquium today? It was just phenomenal.

And my colleague says, no, no. I'm sorry, I had another commitment. And then the colleague would say, so what was the colloquium exactly about? And then you realize, yeah, I know the title. I know the overall picture, but there's just no way I could reproduce any part of it. Because it's focused on information transfer. That's not to say that colloquial are not good. I mean, they make you enthusiastic for different purposes.

but as any type of lecture, as the principal vehicle for teaching, it's just not very useful. Because it steps to that information transfer, rather than the making sense part, and that's where you and I, as professors, come in, we can help our students make sense of the material. and not by telling them, but by designing activities that help them make sense of it. I think I read in one of your studies that there's a tendency for a professor to answer his or own question. So we'll normally say, you know, the expansion rate of the universe in the second Friedman equation, what is the dominant term in the first billion years of the universe? And we hate to have silence because, as Jerry Seinfeld said, you know, studies show that more people, people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying.

So that means you'd rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. And I feel like that when it's very uncomfortable to sit up there and just listen and wait when there's no responses. You don't know if anyone's paying attention. But you sort of suspect that you're a good enough teacher that, oh, someone must have gotten this. even the dullest of dullards, you know, would get something. And then they just wait. And then finally we give up. And the average dwell time, I think according to your studies, was like seven seconds.

So it's, you know, the equation, right? Okay. Yeah, it's a, it's a lambda, you know, it's an omega matter. Okay, great. Thanks. You know, but they just sit there and they hope you won't call upon them. So I guess the question is, let's say I want to tactically approach this with the idea of improving my sort of conversion.

of information in my head or about the subject to my students. And I do want to use technology. I do believe, by the way, that we don't let students use their iPhones in class or we, frown upon. I do. They can bring everything to class. They can bring everything to exams. They can do it, including chat, JPT.

Absolutely everything. Okay, great. I actually salute that idea. But I want to ask you about technology in the classroom. What sorts of tools could displace that anxiety? You know, they say that 18-year-olds go through kind of a withdrawal symptom if they don't have their phone in their hand. So the ways to flip that around to use it in a better way that we could actually use it for our advantage. Absolutely.

So that's exactly what you need to do. You need to hijack the phone so that they're using it for a, you know, educational purpose rather than a social purpose. So one of the things you can do is you can ask them a question and have them record plenty of different platforms to do that. their answer is on their phone and then have the phone match them up with somebody else who has a different answer so they can debate their answers. Or have them find somebody who has a, it doesn't have to be a phone, of course. It could be a tablet or it could be a laptop too. Having them make a commitment, then finding somebody else in the class to talk to. And then they're lost in anonymity, right?

I mean, you'd be stunned. It'll be very different from when you asked the question and hope to get an individual to answer you, which is very intimidating. Here, they just turn to their neighbor and they start talking to their neighbor who is one of their peers. There's no inhibition whatsoever.

And within a second, the whole classroom is filled with noise and everybody is, in a sense, anonymous in the sea of noise. And it's in these exchanges that you see the aha moments that should really be happening. in class. Oh, I never thought about it this way. And now I see why I got this wrong. You know, and then you can have them re-record the answer so that you, what then after the discussion, right, if they've changed, if they're not changed their mind, they answer the same thing. If they change their mind, they revise their answer. And you'll have a record also at how

effective the question was in addressing misconceptions among the students. Now, you may think, isn't this taking advantage of the better students to teach the weaker students? Aren't we sort of lowering the bar? But think about it. In any class you teach, Brian, who is the person who learns the most? It's you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So in a sense, you give the better students a chance to step into the shoes of the teacher. And as we all know, know verbalizing our understanding reinforces it. So it's really a win-win situation. It's not that the weaker student benefits at the expense of the better students. No, Bose gain. I want to now turn to the top, what I call the top of the funnel, and that's when we hire professors. And I remember a

quote from Isidore Rabbi who said something to the effect of, we hire professors because they're good at research and they are good at raising money and they're good at doing all sorts of other things. And if they're a gentleman, they also make an effort to teach. And it seems to me that if you ask a student, what's the purpose of a university? It's to teach, right? So how come we have put so little effort and emphasis on hiring, you know, good teachers when we really put this exorbitant amount of effort on a postdoc's ability to lead a project, have papers published in research, and we prioritize that, aren't we sending the message up front

at the top of the funnel in the worst possible way? The teaching is, because we can't vet you. We can't expect a postdoc to have taught a class. So aren't we, don't we need to flip the classroom, so to speak, much earlier in the upstream than we actually are doing as professors that hire other professors? I couldn't agree more. You know, I mean, think about it. For just about every profession, you need to be trained and you need to be, you need to be certified, right? The electrician who puts in the lights here and the ceiling of my office needs to be licensed. You wouldn't hire an unlicensed electrician and then have your house burned down. You wouldn't want to go to a dentist who doesn't have a license.

You wouldn't want to be, you know, undergo surgery from a heart surgeon who isn't licensed. to do those operations. There's a good reason for wanting people who hold important positions or who affect people's lives to be licensed. To teach kindergarten, you need a license. To teach in schools, you need a license. For our teaching, the one you and I do,

we need nothing. Well, we need a PhD, and we're expected by virtue of this PhD, to know how to educate the next generation of leaders of society. If you stop to think about it, it makes no sense. It's almost as if we're a cartel, you know, and there's no accountability either. That is the big problem.

And that gets compounded by the fact that lecturing creates the absolute perfect illusion of learning. It's like moving a mountain, but we should really be thinking I mean, the literature is full of evidence that the approach to teaching that we've adopted in the Middle Ages in Bologna, as you pointed out, where we use the Greek amphitheater, which was designed as a performance space, as a learning space. There's plenty of evidence that that approach doesn't work, yet we completely ignore that and we continue to do generation after generation after generation. what we've always been doing. Because there's no accountability

and because there's no, you know, expectation of needing any training, everybody knows how to teach. You teach the way you were learned. You learned it yourself, I mean, you were taught yourself. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. That's right. And I feel like there's also an erroneous conflation of teaching and grading. I'd love to get to your perspective on that. Why do we need grade?

I mean, I've often thought that why shouldn't everyone get an A or why shouldn't, I mean, if not for sorting and kind of ranking, but look, I'm teaching cosmology. If someone's going to be injured because, you know, cosmologist gives the wrong value of the Hubble constant, I mean, we don't even agree on the Hubble constant as astronomers, right? So, but I can see it for a physician and, you know, God forbid, they graduate and they don't know, you know, some, the gravity of an inclined plane, you know, who knows what would happen to their patients. But let me ask you, why do we associate, why do we require professors to also be graders? And what's wrong with giving everybody an A? Two points that I want to raise here. First of all, it is kind of odd that we are in both positions. We're in the position of teaching. We're our goal is to maximize the learning in the classroom. And then at the assessment part, we make a Jekyll and Hyde transition and become the judge.

Right. So I can think of no other, no other human endeavor where coach and judge is folded into one. I mean, society would revolt, right? I mean, you're a surgeon, you operate on, you're the one evaluating if the surgery is fine. If the patient dies and but the surgery in your opinion was good, it's good. I mean, that would never happen. Or you're a sports coach and you go to the Olympics and then you take a seat at the judge's bench. Nobody would expect that and accept that. Yet in academia, that's exactly what we do. We set the test. It's almost like a silent pack, packed between you and the students.

I'll teach you, you'll tolerate my bad teaching, I'll give you an exam, you can pass, and I'm the one grading it. You're totally right. We don't need grades. We don't need grades because grades focus the students not on the learning, but on the passing of the test in order to get a good grade. And you would think, well, isn't that the same thing? No, of course not, because there are plenty of shortcuts. A lot of things that we call cheating between the students, we tolerate, it's completely acceptable in real life. I mean, when I write a paper at my desk here, I can talk to anyone I want. I can look up anything I want. And why do we call it cheating when the students do that? Are we training them for the type of work that they will actually do? by cutting them off from other individuals and cutting them off from information.

So grades do two things. One is they make students risk averse. Right? I mean, if you have a high-stakes examination and your admission, let's say, to medical school or to graduate school depends on your grades, you're going to do whatever is necessary to get the highest grade, including things that are not very productive, like cramming, or even cheating perhaps.

You'll cut corners. You and I would do the same thing. If our merit increase in our salary from one year to the other would depend on one simple, pretty stupid, you know, high-stakes test, we would probably do whatever is necessary to pass that test in order to get the maximum raise we can get. It's the human nature, after all. So we can't blame the student.

really for that. So it makes them risk averse, and by making them risk averse, it robs them of creativity, an opportunity to be creative. I better not be creative. I better do what the professor expects rather than what I think is a novel and interesting approach. So we rob individuals of their creativity and we robbed them of an opportunity to learn for their own sakes rather than for the sake of passing a test. So I am totally with you and I unfortunately I can't impact my institution. I gave a talk here many years ago. It's on YouTube. It's called Assessment, the silent killer of learning. After that talk, which was attended by about 300 of my colleagues, the dean of the college took me out to dinner and he was so, you know, riled up, he said, we have to eliminate

grades. Well, that was about eight or nine years ago and here we are. We still have grades. However, there are ways around it. One way is to adopt something called specification grading or an approach called ungrading. And I would, we don't have the time to get into the details, but I would highly recommend anybody who is interested in it to look into those two approaches to grading, which is sort of an intermediate step between having no grades and purely narrative evaluation and the old-fashioned approach to high-stakes testing and grades. So ungrading and specifications grading. Hey there, it's me again here with a fantastic offer for you.

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I want to talk about the other part of being an academic nowadays, which is the faculty side, which is tenure, which also, I think the need for grading has a negative feedback impact in that. you know, we want to be liked by our students. We do get evaluated from our students. I always tell my students, you know, help me get a new motorized yacht, you know, by filling out this, I always joke about it. But I remember, you know, when we used to do written forms back at Case Western, I remember my beloved professor Philip Taylor. You know, we do a written evaluation. He'd say, who would like to take this down to the, to the waistbasket? But in reality, I think we all crave

assessment. I mean, we're very high achievers, right? I mean, to get into the level of academia that you're in required, you know, just incredible gifts and skills and also extreme hard work. And I feel the same way, too. It's not a gift. It's a lot of hard work. But now that we're there, we kind of want to protect ourselves. And we've made up this kind of moat as professors called tenure. And the only difference I point out from the University of Bologna, if you teleported a student from Bologna to, you know, San Diego, say, and you put them in there, they'd say, oh, there's a, there's a guy scratching on a rock with another piece of rock. Okay, I get that. There's this, like, really flat screen over there. I don't know what that's for. But besides that,

at least I, Brian, you know, student in 1040 AD or whatever 1080 AD, at least I have the ability to go on strike, right? So the students would go on strike. Then the faculty wouldn't get paid. So there was even an incentive for them. And thank God, I always say we have 10. You're now that abolish that barbaric practice of students going on strike. But tell me, is tenure also contributing to this problem? Because we're playing it safe until we get tenure. And then once we have tenure, we don't really use it. I mean, let's be honest.

As a physics professor, I mean, your colleague and my beloved friend Avi Lowe or Lawrence tribe or Stephen, you know, they're, you know, they're not going to get, you know, fire. Stephen's very outspoken. Lawrence is very outspoken. But Avi, you know, a physicist like you and me, we're not going to get fired for, oh, we're going to, like, even if I support the heliocentrism, I'm not going to get fired. People might make fun of me, but I don't believe in that, by the way. But tell me, is tenure part of the problem?

And it's encouraging, you know, the kind of worst teachers rising to the top because they might be, you know, entrenched in the tenure cartel. I am not 100% sure of that. I think the bigger problem is really the lack of training and the lack of accountability we have. It's true that tenure is sort of in a sense of very. a high-stakes assessment to pass through. But you get a lot of feedback on the way. It's not just that you work in a vacuum,

and then all of a sudden there's this high-stakes decision that determines your future. What I do object to is that many universities, including my own, have two tracks of faculty members, one focused on the traditional values of research, service, and education too, which is tenured, and then what is often called the non-ladder faculty track, adjunct professors, lecturers, preceptors, who do not have tenure and never will get tenure, who are very disposable, you know, they get appointed and not, and mostly focus on teaching

and often do a very important job teaching because they teach the classes that the tenured faculty members don't want to teach. What kind of message is that approach sending? It screams. Teaching is not that important. The important part is the advancement of knowledge. So that I think is a major problem. And in that respect, you know, maybe not giving tenure to the faculty,

but giving tenure only to part of the faculty and not to others. to others is a very significant problem, I think. And maybe this is the last question. If you ran a new university called Mazur University, what would you teach? What subjects do you feel a modern Renaissance woman should know? What aspects of the intellectual endeavor of Western or Eastern culture, civilization, or Southern or Northern?

What would you require? What would be mandatory? and why? I think rather than focusing on the what to know, meaning the content, I would probably very strongly shift towards what skills would I teach, especially now in an age of generative AI where knowledge and content are, you know, rapidly taken over by technology. And I think what you said earlier was very perceptive.

You know, it's the people who successfully use Genitive AI who are going to take the jobs of others. And therefore, that's one skill that one might want to teach in a 21st century university. And I think the content, the content is dependent on what the student wants to focus on, I would say. I would give much more autonomy to the students to determine the content and the problem.

they want to address. And also the siloing of knowledge in different disciplines goes contrary to everything we do, right? All the major problems in society in the 21st century are multidisciplinary problems. All the engineering, all the technology are multidisciplinary. When you design an airplane, you know, there's chemistry involved, there's material science involved,

there's physics that is involved, there's psychology involved, you know, can you keep people happy if the flight is more than 70, hours, biology, you name it. It's a multidisciplinary problem. And I would say most of what we do outside of academia, we live in an ivory tower here and we're siloed. So we can be perfectly happy in our narrow silos.

But in society, any entity, any company, any organization is inherently multidisciplinary. So I think we need to let go of this grip we have on constant. content, realize that by siloing content into disciplines, we leave a lot of important problems unaddressed because they fall either in between those silos or involve more than one silos. And I would really focus on skills. How do people effectively collaborate? How do people effectively use technology?

How do we solve the problems of 21st century? We have plenty of them from, you know, the environment to conflict to energy, you name it. So I would probably focus much less on content and much more on skills. Eric, it's been a great treat and an honor, and I want folks to know out there what an incredible scientist you are as well, leading Optica and the Optical Society and working on ultra-short laser pulses. Maybe we'll talk about that next time we'll ever get to meet each other because you've done so. much in the field of photonic devices, femtosecond lasers, even surgical techniques that involve the micromanipulation of subcellular organelles, Eric Mazur Balcansky Professor of Physics and Applied Physics. You're really an inspiration to me and many of the other faculty.

We have thousands of professors that listen to this. I know they're going to enjoy it. And I just really appreciate your time and serving as a remote mentor to millions thousands, at least, millions maybe around the world. And you pass the test. So, thank you so much, Eric. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Great talking to you. Okay, bye-bye. See you. Thank you. But the rest of you out there that are watching, I just want you to know if you have a .edu email address in this highly educational field. I love to give these meteorites away. This is a chunk of four billion-year-old space schmutzum meteorite impacted four billion years ago. and has been studied by myself and others,

and we're going to send you some information about it. So you're guaranteed to win if you have a .edu email address, but if you don't, you might win, and by chance I pick one lucky viewer or subscriber to my Monday magic messages, which include amusing, some sort of appearance that I've made recently, something genius from around the world of science and education,

an image, perhaps one from my research, or perhaps even better, from other people's research. And then a conversation than I had, just like the one we just listened to with Eric Mazur. And there's many, many more. I know you're going to love my conversation with Cal Newport, who's also a professor. I have interviews with Stephen Pinker and Avi Loeb, his colleagues. And I even have one with Larry Tribe. It's a very different impression on the channels.

Check the back catalog. I know you'll enjoy it. We do this not just for people that can afford to be university students right now, but to really provide free of charge educational content to, you know, as many people as we can, because I believe that's my moral obligation. As a person whose education was funded by taxpayers, as public student, and teaching at a public university, that's my promise to you. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Leave me a comment, review, thumbs up, thumbs down even, but let me know what you like and what you don't.

And I'll always try to improve my skills as an educator and as a podcaster. Really, those are two similar things. So thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. And keep looking up. and casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

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