A couple of loosely connected thoughts to make up for my lack of recent posts. I came across this apparently timeless description of teaching:
There is the stereotypes teacher – the teacher who is like a collection of phonograph records which the human phonograph rolls out before his class in the same order annually – the talking text-book, who instructs his students what it will pay them to read, payment being made in examination marks – the type of teacher whose students, machine-made like himself, will grind out the tune, after the clockwork has been wound up, by due preparation on the candidates' part, the tune required written out by the examiner, and the clockwork started.
And, on the other hand, there is the great teacher, the inspired teacher, he who soars above scientific fashion, whose doxy becomes scientific orthodoxy, who produces thinkers, not mere successful examinees.
As the reference to the phonograph suggests, this was written some time ago, by William Edward Ayrton about his teacher William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. Kelvin in the 'Sixties was a reminiscence of Ayrton's university days in Glasgow, written in 1908 in the brief period between Kelvin's death and his own.
Not only does this introduction capture a style of teaching that many students will recognize more than a century later, its allusion to mechanistic automation echoes the current controversy of educational automation – Chat GPT.
The article goes on to recount Kelvin's experimental apparatus in the style of Heath Robinson, the tribulations of the students when Kelvin tried to adjust their experiments, and above all their excitement of being taught by someone at the heart of developing a technical new field. As Ayrton observed, this worked well for enthusiasts such as himself with previous experience. But the recollections of the divinity, medical, and law students in the class may well have differed.
Ayrton was soon a prolific contributor to the then-new field of electrical engineering. Given the modern ubiquity of electrical technology, it is hard to picture those early days when the little was understood, the pace of development was tremendous, and the outcomes uncertain (Chat GPT, anyone?).
To someone such as myself who cooks entirely with electricity, the following news snippet from 1892 brings home the point.
In a recent lecture on the cost of the electricity, Prof. Ayrton says that, while at first sight it would seem that it could not possibly be economical to use the current for heating purposes, it must be considered that there is a minimum of waste in its employment, since it can be applied just where it is wanted. Using a frying pan with a zig-zag of insulated wire embedded in it, a temperature sufficient to cook an omelet was obtained at a cost of less than half a cent, while the time required was only one and one-half minutes.
Artistry in teaching and omelette-making cannot be automated!
- Reprinted in Popular Science Monthly 72, 1908, 259.
- Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 5 June 1892, 10.