Comment by gnosis
15 years ago
"One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”"
This is not just a Brazilian problem. Much of the university education in the US is the same. Very few students ask questions and consider question asking to be a waste of time.
Rote memorization just to pass tests is sadly all too prevalent in US universities as well.
I remember sitting in a class at Columbia and wondering why students were asking so many pointless questions, designed to show how much they knew rather than establish anything useful.
In my university (Oxford, Modern History) you feared looking stupid by asking questions at lectures, and instead asked your friends afterwards and read up yourself.
Different cultures, none are perfect, I guess.
I imagine Feynman's lectures would have made me feel "too stupid to ask". Probably says more about me than him :)
Well, in the US at least its kind of impossible to pass math/engineering exams without having some sort of deeper understanding of the problem. It sounds like the exams in Brazil at the time didn't expand upon anything past memorized definitions - I think you'd be hard pressed to find a serious physics course in the US that would let you get away with that.