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Was Richard Feynman a Great Teacher?
Was Richard Feynman a great teacher? Probably not at the undergraduate level. Is he a model that K-12 and undergraduate teachers and college professors should emulate, as Bill Gates seems to suggest? Reviewing the actual history of The Feynman Lectures on Physics and the 1960’s “introductory” course on physics taught by Feynman that the famous red books are based on, probably not.There is a bigger picture issue here. Richard Feynman constructed an “introductory” physics course at Caltech suitable primarily for perhaps imaginary extreme physics prodigies like himself or how he pictured himself as an eighteen year old. It is an open question how well the actual eighteen year old Feynman would have done in the forty-three year old Feynman’s “introductory” physics course. Like many adults had Feynman lost touch with what it had been like to be eighteen? In any case, such extreme physics prodigies made up only a small fraction of the highly qualified undergraduate students at Caltech either in the 1960’s or 1980’s. An educational system designed by extreme prodigies for extreme prodigies, often from academic families, extremely wealthy families, or other unusual backgrounds rare even among most top students as conventionally defined, is a prescription for disaster for the vast majority of students and society at large.
