Happy New Year!

I had a chance to catch up on some reading over the holidays and one thing I had set aside was an article in the New York Times [1] about Professor Walter H.G. Lewin, a physics professor at MIT who has become known for his lively and engaging lectures. Professor Lewin is quite the performer, apparently, rigging cans of water to demonstrate how to make a simple battery, beating a student with cat fur to build up a static electricity charge powerful enough for the student to light a neon light tube just by touching it, and swinging on stage to demonstrate the physics of a pendulum. (You can check out his lectures, available for free at http://ocw.mit.edu/ [2]. You can also find a few clips on YouTube [3].)

As with all great teachers, Professor Lewin knows the best way to engage students is to show them how complex concepts work, not just tell them. This requires some planning including building demos, acquiring props and preparing remarks. Professor Lewin is a spry 71 and owns the stage he occupies. He looks like he’s really enjoying himself and his students are rapt. Lewin says it takes him about 25 hours to prepare one lecture. Assuming the lecture is about an hour and a half or less, that’s about a 20:1 ratio, which is about right. Professor Lewin is the epitome of “show, don’t tell.”