Hello everyone welcome to the November 2023 Ask Me Anything Edition of the

Winescape Podcast I'm your host Sean Carroll not a lot of things to share with you

before we get into it today but I did think that this might be an effective place to stop and reflect a bit on teaching, which I'm doing again now.

You know, when I was at Caltech, which I was when I started, Mindscape, five years ago.

I basically didn't do any teaching.

I taught one course the entire time I was at Caltech for whatever it was,

16 years.

And of course, I'd done plenty of teaching before that at the University of Chicago and even a little bit at MIT and Harvard, but it's been a while. I'm rusty, right? I'm out of practice. And more importantly importantly the kind of teaching I have been doing so far at

Johns Hopkins has been different than what I am familiar with from my previous experience

which was mostly lecturing advanced physics topics.

At the University of Chicago, for example, when you're a theoretical physicist,

you are almost always assigned graduate level courses to teach. They have that informal

distinction there. I did teach a couple of undergraduate courses. I taught a, I started a course on undergraduate general relativity which is very popular and

shoddy Bartch who was a former Mindscape guest she and I co-taught a course in a humanities course on moments in

atheism, on the intellectual history of atheism throughout the ages. And that was

kind of a classic thing where it was supposed to be a seminar, but then a lot of people wanted to take it, and we ended up letting a lot of people take it, and then it just turns into lectures. You can't have 40 people in the room and give everyone really a full chance to speak.

So I haven't had this experience before that I've had both this year and last year at Hopkins

of really just sitting in the room with 12 people and have it truly be a discussion-based

seminar, which I always love. Those are always my favorite courses when I was an undergraduate.

I do have very strong opinions that a good old-fashioned

lecture is still an awesome paradigm for teaching. I remember once when I was not long after I had been at MIT and I taught a big

lecture course there in general relativity which later turned into the textbook that I wrote,

...