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June 17, 2009
Who Exposes More?
My real question is which type of academic actively exposes more of him or herself when explaining the stuff of their discipline? For the purposes of this post I will entertain a somewhat false dichotomy and assume that mathematicians and scientists make up one class of academic and historians and literary specialists which I will call academic humanists, make up the only other. Let's leave sociologists, economists, some philosophers, and the like out of consideration for now. This reduces my question to, "Do mathematicians and scientists or academic humanists expose more of themselves when explaining the content of their respective fields?"
Let me say first that I'm don't necessarily think there is a consistent answer, but I sure think there is a tendency. While I've noticed what I think is this tendency before, let me present my reason for raising the question now. For quite a while, Shirley and I have been taking video CD format courses from the Teaching Company. These courses range from 12 to 48 half-hour lectures. Most of the ones we've taken are of the 24 lecture variety but we have taken a few longer ones and we took one 12 lecture course. For the Teaching Companies business model to work the course must be both entertaining and instructive and, for the most part, they are. We have alternated between courses in the humanities like "History of the Greek and Persian Wars" and courses in mathematics and science. We also try to alternate between general surveys like "The History of Western Civilization" and more focused courses like "Chaos Theory."
We are currently about halfway through what amounts to a survey course in mathematics. But a survey course with a couple of abnormally interesting twists. Taught by Arthur Benjamin of Harvey Mudd College, it's called the "Joy of Mathematics." The twists are that Benjamin covers more number theory and combinational analysis, his academic specialties, than one might expect in such a course and he teaches us how to do mathematical parlor tricks, his hobby. Benjamin is wildly animated and entertaining. In the course of the course, he has worked his wife and his children into various illustrations and even into a few very corny math jokes. He is also wildly enthusiastic about his discipline. Tonight he went off on the beauty of Euler's equality (eiπ+1=0, you know, God's equation, in case you're not exactly sure what Euler's equality amounts to). He lavished praise on every element of the equation, every relationship in the equation and the wonder of the whole of it. And he made his enthusiasm palatable.
Now Benjamin is an extreme and wonderful case. But what both of us have noticed in general is that the mathematicians and scientists tend to expose more of their own personalities in their lectures than do the humanists. All the mathematicians and scientists that we listened to so far have left us believing that they are real humans who love their disciplines but most of the humanists we have listened to have left us wondering about both their humanity and their love of subject. Not that the humanists weren't great, often entertaining lecturers and not that we didn't learn from them but something often seemed missing, themselves as people. Now this is far from a scientific survey and it depends in large part on how Shirley and I see the world, but I really believe that the mathematicians and scientists, on average, communicate more interest in their work and more enthusiasm for it than do most academic humanists.
If any of this is true, why might it be? Well, my first and for now only thought is that the humanists worry about improper intrusion of their subjective selves into the lectures and they therefore leave themselves also most totally out while mathematicians and scientists feel no need, in most cases have no need, to worry about this.
Has anyone else noticed this tendency or do you think I'm just making it up? If you do think there is something going on in this neighborhood, to what do you attribute it?
Posted by Duane Smith at June 17, 2009 9:01 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
I'm going to sidestep the possibility that the scientists and mathematics are simply more fun than us people in my field. Not because it mightn't be true, but because I don't like it.
I've noticed it since I first discovered George Gamov and Richard Feynman. Doesn't it seem that there's a sense of freedom where the human being is not the subject matter at hand?
I also wonder if my perceptions of the humanities is skewed by my being in Bible, especially in seminary: there's an unfortunate tendency to “heaviness” associated with handling this charged, controversial material that maybe isn’t typical of all academic teaching of the humanities. Still, yes, I’m more likely to expect entertaining presentation in public education by a math prof than by, say, an art or dance teacher.
Posted by: Brooke at June 18, 2009 8:06 AM
The academic humanists have the fear that they will not be seen as scientific and hence the dull demeanor brought on by faulty observation, and in some cases they move the history departments from humanities to the social sciences, which does not help.
Math and science teachers are free to entertain because their disciplined is respected,and they do not want others to think that numbers are dull.
But this may be only on the surface. Great scholars on both sides of this issue seem to rise above it.
Posted by: Loren Fisher at June 18, 2009 12:13 PM
I wanted to find resources you mentioned, but Googling "Learning Company" only threw up the news that their website is down and according to Wikipedia one can buy their products from online retailers, but Amazon (surely the architypical online retailer) only lists kids learning with cartoon rabbits, which does not strike me (dull and boring humanist that I must be) as such fun as the Maths series you mentioned... can you point me to a source?
Posted by: Tim Bulkeley at June 19, 2009 2:40 PM
Tim,
I just got their website at http://www.teach12.com/
Posted by: Duane at June 19, 2009 2:56 PM
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