The Heart of Teaching : Lessons from Leading Minds (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Simon W. Bowmaker, University

Interview with Steven E. Landsburg,

June 24, 2009

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Steven Landsburg was born in Philadelphia in 1954 and obtained a PhD in mathematics from the in 1979. He has taught both economics and mathematics at a number of universities, including Colorado State University and the University of Iowa, and is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, where he has taught for almost twenty years. At Rochester, Professor Landsburg teaches undergraduate courses in introductory macroeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, intermediate microeconomics, and advanced microeconomics. In 2007, he received the University’s Professor of the Year in Social Sciences award for his outstanding teaching accomplishments. Professor Landsburg’s research interests include algebraic K-theory, module patching, quantum game theory, philosophy of science and moral philosophy. His articles have been published in the Journal of Political Economy, American Journal of Mathematics, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Communications in Algebra, and Journal of Public Economic Theory. His books include, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics (Free Press, 2009), More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (Free Press, 2007), Price Theory and Applications (South-Western Publishing Company, seventh edition, 2007), Macroeconomics (McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1996), co- authored with Lauren Feinstone, and The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (Free Press, 1995). I interviewed Steven Landsburg in the coffee room of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester. It was the early afternoon of Wednesday, June 24, 2009.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Bowmaker: You never took a course in economics at university and hold a PhD in mathematics. How did you end up as an economics professor?

Landsburg: I had a lot of friends in college who were economics majors, so I picked up a lot of their enthusiasm, and I was always interested and excited by economics, although I somehow never took a course in it. When I went to graduate school, I immediately fell in with a bunch of economics graduate students as friends and picked up a tremendous amount from them over the lunch table. I happened to be living next door to them in the dormitory, so I don’t remember whether I was seeking out economists, or how much of it was luck. And at one point when I was looking, probably unwisely, for a break from writing my thesis, I got interested in a problem in economics and ended up writing a paper (‘Taste Change in the United Kingdom, 1900-1955’) that got some attention. It was published in the Journal of Political Economy [in 1981], largely because I got lucky in that the data happened to show something. I didn’t have any tremendous insight and I didn’t really know any economics. I had just heard about this problem from friends, worked on it, got a strong result, and had it published in a good journal. So, I guess that got me started as a credential.

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Bowmaker: As a student, did any of your teachers stand out as being particularly influential or inspirational?

Landsburg: In math, Saunders Mac Lane was a tremendous inspiration, both as a great teacher and because one was aware that he was a great mathematician. Yitz Herstein, Irving Kaplansky, to a lesser degree, and over in the economics department, I spoke a lot to what was then Don McCloskey, although I was not a student there and I was not taking classes. He was tremendously encouraging and inspirational. I learned a lot from him, and he made me believe that I could do economics. When I graduated in math, I took a job as a post doc in economics at Chicago, and Becker, Stigler and Lucas were the main people that I was talking to. Again, none of them was formally my teacher, but all three were fantastically helpful and inspirational.

Bowmaker: As a teacher, have any of your colleagues been particularly influential in terms of developing your style and approach in the classroom?

Landsburg: I don’t think so. There are colleagues who inspire me every day by their intellectual feats and so on, but I think as a teacher I pretty much sprang full bloom.

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON TEACHING

Bowmaker: What do you like most about teaching and what do you like least?

Landsburg: What I like most is the intimate relationship that you have with your students. It is the chance to interact with them and to have ideas flow back and forth and to believe that you’ve been able to show them new ways of seeing the world that will be with them forever. Anything I’m going to say on that will be terribly cliché, but it’s what I love about teaching. What I like least is sitting down with a stack of exams and grading them over a couple of days. I do all my own grading by choice and I think I’m the only person in the department who does that. I have TA’s but I don’t let them touch the exams.

Bowmaker: Why not?

Landsburg: For a number of reasons. One, I feel like it’s important for me to read the students’ answers so that I can see whether there are patterns in what they’re not understanding and that tells me what I need to explain better. But secondly, because my exams tend to require a lot of creativity, I’m not sure I trust the TA’s to know exactly what it is that I’m looking for, or exactly what it is that the students can be expected to have already known. I want to give a lot more credit to a student who has an original idea than to a student who’s just parroting something I said in class. And the TA’s are not always aware of exactly what I’ve said in class, so they can’t always tell when they’re reading the exams what’s original and what’s parroting.

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Bowmaker: On balance, do you think that teaching effectiveness and research productivity are complementary or competing endeavors?

Landsburg: I think they’re complementary, in the same way that teaching the flute and being good at playing the flute are complementary. Of course, there are tremendous exceptions in both directions from this. I know great researchers who are lousy teachers, and I know great teachers who are lousy researchers or less accomplished researchers. But, by and large, if you’re looking to take flute lessons, you want to take them from a really good flute player and I think if you’re looking to learn to think about economics, you want to learn from somebody who’s really good at thinking about economics and that’s usually going to be somebody with a significant research career.

THE LEARNING PROCESS

Bowmaker: How would you describe your understanding of how humans learn?

Landsburg: I am well aware that there’s a great variety of learning styles and probably, like any teacher, I do a better job of catering to some of those styles than to others. I think I learned more as a parent than as a teacher about the great variety of learning styles. My daughter often was not good at learning in ways that I kind of expected all kids to be good at and then she was spectacularly good at learning in other ways. Of course, I observed her more carefully than I observed my students and cared about her more than I cared about my students so it made me much more aware than I previously was of the diversity in the way people learn. But, mostly, in order to learn you have to care about what you’re learning. And the one thing that’s common to most good students is that they want to learn. The biggest mistake that students make in economics, in my experience, is that when they’re confronted with a new question they haven’t seen before, they ask themselves, “What other question have I seen before that’s kind of like this?” and then they give the answer to that question. Those are the ones who have a great deal of difficulty succeeding and I think the difference between those who really learn and those who don’t is very often a willingness to look at a question and say, “Hey, here’s something I need to find a new way of thinking about it,” as opposed to saying, “Here’s something I have to squeeze into some mold I’m already familiar with.”

Bowmaker: How do you assess whether the students are learning the material?

Landsburg: I think a well-crafted exam can do that. I put a fantastic amount of time into creating my exams, which is another part of teaching that I have come to hate, actually. I used to be really enthusiastic about that task and it has become tedious for me. But I still put a tremendous amount of time into trying to concoct questions that will enable the weak students to show you what they’ve learned and also allow the strong students to show you what they can do that’s original. I typically tell my students that they are going to get about half credit for repeating back to me accurately all the material that they have learned.

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Bowmaker: How do you check your own progress and evaluate your own efforts in the classroom?

Landsburg: By watching faces. Of course, we get the teaching evaluations back at the end of the term and I read those avidly. But I think I know long before the end of the term how I’m doing by being aware of what I see on the students’ faces and you get a tremendous amount of feedback from that.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AND TECHNIQUE

Bowmaker: What do you promise your students?

Landsburg: I implicitly promise them that I will show them some really cool stuff, and that I will do everything I can to explain it as many different ways as possible in order for them to understand it. And, in my opinion, I promise them that they will be graded fairly, although I’m sure some of them would disagree with that.

Bowmaker: What do you expect of your students?

Landsburg: I expect some creativity. I expect that they will go home and not just memorize the answers to the homework questions, but will ask themselves questions like, “How would this answer have been different if this curve had been shaped a little differently or if this point had been in a different place?” I expect them to go home and think hard about things like that, and formulate their own questions like that because they’re not going to do well on the exam problems unless they’ve had experience thinking that way.

Bowmaker: How do you treat your students?

Landsburg: I am not incredibly accessible outside the classroom. I don’t keep office hours because frankly I don’t like to be bothered. I’ll hang around for as long as they want me to after class, but I tell them if they need to see me at another time, they can make an appointment. I absolutely do respond to that, but I don’t make it easy for them to come see me because I have other things to do. So, in that sense, maybe I treat them particularly badly. But on the other hand, when I do interact with them, I try to treat them with respect. I don’t belittle them. I’m not sarcastic with them. Not many people do that, but some people do. Yitz Herstein, who was one of my greatest teachers, was incredibly sarcastic and belittling towards students when they asked questions that he thought were not insightful enough. That style worked for him, but I think that style is usually counterproductive. And I’m pretty good at letting students know that I respect them and care about them, except for the fact that I don’t want them to take too much of my time.

Bowmaker: How do you prepare to teach?

Landsburg: I’ve never prepared a lecture in my life. I often walk into class not even sure of what I’m going to talk about. And that’s particularly true in a class I teach called ‘Topics in

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Microeconomics’ where we do a series of three or four lecture topics that are unrelated to each other and that can be done in any order. I’ve often walked into that class and just, on a whim, started a topic that I had never intended to address in the class. And that has always worked for me. I don’t get nervous. I don’t get worried that I’m not going to know what to say. I’m not scared of making a mistake in front of the students—if I do, I will correct it. I know a lot of people feel some kind of stage fright about that kind of thing, but I’ve just never felt that.

Bowmaker: What are your primary teaching methods? Is there something in particular that you do that is intended to help and encourage students to learn?

Landsburg: The main thing that I do is when students ask questions, I try to engage in a short dialogue with them that will help me craft an answer that will actually be helpful to them. When most people get a question, they will either repeat the explanation they’ve already given, or will go on to their second favourite explanation. I make a real effort to find out from the student what kind of explanation he needs before I launch into it. That’s a very valuable thing to do and I think it is the secret of my very high teaching evaluations. I’m very popular among the students despite being a very, very tough grader.

Bowmaker: How do you deal with the heterogeneity that exists among students in a typical class?

Landsburg: I tend to speak to the top of the class and let the bottom of the class scramble along as best they can. I have found that there’s a certain fraction of the students who are not going to follow me no matter what I say. There’s not much I can do for them. And there’s another group who are going to rise to whatever challenge I give them, and I like to give them some challenges. So, I tend to aim high and some of the weaker ones probably get completely left behind and ignored.

Bowmaker: How do you keep the material fresh for your own sense of engagement in the classroom?

Landsburg: Well, that varies from class to class. I’ve been teaching intermediate micro for, my God, probably 30 years and it doesn’t change much from year to year, but often on the spur of the moment, I’ll think of a new way to explain something that I haven’t done before. And that happens several times per semester and I get excited about that. But I think much more than that, it’s the fact that you’re dealing with a different group of human beings. And I do always feel when I’m in front of the class that I’m talking to people. I don’t feel like it’s just a sea of faces out there. They’re human beings and I feel like there is intimate communication going on. I make a lot of eye contact, I watch for their facial expressions, and I try to engage them in some dialogue by throwing out questions. I’m sure we all have our favourite jokes and anecdotes and stories that we’ve told 100 times, but it’s always fresh when you tell it to somebody new.

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Bowmaker: How do you achieve the right balance between being objective and incorporating your own views in the classroom?

Landsburg: Two or three times a semester I will take 15 minutes to say, “Here’s something that I feel like I want to say, and I want to make clear this is my opinion.” When we’re talking about free trade, I make all of the economic arguments for the efficiency of free trade and so on, but I cannot resist making the point that it just seems to me to be ugly to care about the nationality of your trading partner—like preferring to buy from an American rather than a Mexican. That has nothing to do with economics. But, for the most part, I keep that stuff out of the classroom.

Bowmaker: To what extent has your background in math influenced your teaching of economics?

Landsburg: Tremendously. The most math I use in the classroom is to write down the equation of a budget line, but I am very rigorous about differentiating between assumptions and conclusions and logical steps in ways that surely show the sensibility of a mathematician. And I think for a large class of students that makes the material much clearer. I have always found that the math and engineering majors are the strongest students in my class. Now, that may partly be because math and engineering students on average are just smarter, but I think it’s probably also because I organize things in a way that comes naturally to them.

Bowmaker: You’re very well known for your popular writing in economics. How has that influenced your teaching of economics and, at the same time, how has your writing influenced your teaching?

Landsburg: When you’re writing something, you’re thinking hard about better ways to explain it and some of those better ways to explain it end up in the classroom. And when you’re in the classroom, you’re thinking hard about better ways to explain things, and some of those end up in your popular writing. Now, some of the things you think of in the classroom are not appropriate for your popular writing, because they involve a better way to move curves around in a graph, but sometimes you’re talking to a student who’s not getting it, and you try a new different way to explain it, and the student gets it and you say, “Oh, I’ve got to put that in the book.”

Bowmaker: Can you recall any good examples?

Landsburg: I feel like there are dozens. In my book, The Armchair Economist, I talk about how seatbelts cause people to drive more recklessly and that could lead to either more or fewer driver deaths. But on balance empirically, at least in the 1960’s, there appears to have been pretty much no change in the number of driver deaths. I learned from talking to my students what I would not have realized on my own, which is that non-economists frequently misinterpret that empirical fact to mean that seatbelts have done drivers no good. In fact, they have done drivers good, because the drivers get to drive more recklessly and

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they die at the same rate, so they’ve gained something. And so, when I went to write about it in my popular writing, I knew I had to stress that point.

COURSE CONTENT AND DESIGN

Bowmaker: I interviewed Robert Frank for this book. As you may know, he adopts a “less is more” approach to teaching the principles of microeconomics. When you are teaching intermediate microeconomics, would you prefer to teach a student with that type of initial training in economics or a student who has taken the ‘traditional’ course?

Landsburg: Oh, something in between. I’ve started teaching principles recently—for four or five semesters now—and I’m teaching the course that I want them to have. The first time I did it, I did all the usual long-run average cost stuff and so on, and I’ve cut back on that. But what I want them to have above all is the sense that you can’t just say anything. There is such a thing as a right or wrong answer to an economic question. What I worry about with the Robert Frank thing you are describing is that unless it is taught very, very carefully by a very good teacher, students go away with the sense that this is a subject that we get to throw out whatever ideas we have and one idea’s as good as another. I want that stamped out of them. And that means to me, working enough with graphs and with technical apparatus so that they can really point to certain answers and say, “That’s wrong”—it’s wrong because the curves cannot be in that configuration for that answer to be right. So, I absolutely want them to see curves move. I absolutely want them to see that we are applying standards. What particular material you want to cover is far less important. The short run and long-run average cost stuff does strike me as particularly boring, but it doesn’t matter so much as long as you can get across the idea that we really have some methods here that will sort out the right from the wrong answers—and that it’s important to learn them.

Bowmaker: When you are designing your intermediate microeconomics syllabus, how do you strike the right balance between teaching established ideas that have stood the test of time versus incorporating current research?

Landsburg: I don’t make any attempt to incorporate current research. I think there are core ideas they need to learn before they can go on to that current research and that’s what I concentrate on. When I teach my ‘Topics in Microeconomics’ course, I sometimes try and do some very current things and I talk about my own research, because that’s the privilege of teaching a course like that. But, in the intermediate micro course, part of the message I want to get across is that you can’t think about things if you don’t have the proper tools. And the same thing applies to current events, not just current research. Sometimes students come in and they want to talk about something in the news and my attitude is that I’m willing to take a couple of minutes to talk about it, but the main point I want to make is that you cannot think usefully about this stuff until after you’ve learned the material in this course.

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Bowmaker: You have pretty much answered my next question about the balance between formalism and reality. Do you have anything to add?

Landsburg: I try to emphasize to them that reality is hard and before you can understand reality, you’ve got to understand models. To try to jump ahead is not a good idea.

Bowmaker: Where does your course begin and why does it begin where it does?

Landsburg: It begins with supply and demand. What else could it begin with?

Bowmaker: Which are the key ideas at the heart of your course and how do you teach them?

Landsburg: Having worked with supply and demand, and shown that it’s useful, we want to step back and think about where those curves come from. So, we do consumer theory for the basis of the demand curve. I spend a lot of time on income and substitution effects, because I think that’s going to be important for them in many other areas. I spend a lot of time on Giffen goods and all of the reasons why Giffen goods are rare. I stress to them that I know no examples of Giffen goods and I always make a point of saying, “You might wonder why we spend so much time studying something that we don’t know any examples of. The answer is that we want to figure out why we don’t see any examples?” Not seeing something calls out for an explanation as much as seeing something does. Then we do the ‘theory of the firm’ where we do some of the short run, long run stuff although I never talk about average cost. Total costs and marginal costs seem to me to be all I need to make them understand everything. Average cost is in the book that I wrote, and I tell them they can read about it if they want to, but I never use it for anything. If you want to see whether the firm is making positive or negative profits, other books will tell them to look at price minus average cost. I tell them to look at total revenue minus total cost and it’s just one less concept for them to have to worry about. I give very short shrift to production because there’s not enough time to do everything and production is the thing that I find most boring, so I spend less time on it. I’m not sure I’m doing them a service, but that’s what I do. I spend a lot of time on welfare economics, because I think that there are a lot of useful ideas in there that are going to come up for them many times in other courses. So, we spend more than the usual amount of time on “triangles” and the effects of a vast array of different policies. I try to take at least a lecture or two to talk about how the price system allows vast amounts of information to get brought to bear on problems of allocation. And then I give them some rough idea of the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, insofar as I can, given that we don’t really do general equilibrium. And then we talk about what happens when the assumptions under those theorems fail, which means we talk about monopoly and about externalities, if there’s time. Sometimes I run out of time and I don’t get to externalities. When we’re on monopoly, I spend a lot of time talking about pricing strategies—two-part tariffs, that kind of thing—because I think it reinforces a lot of the earlier ideas. You end up working a lot with triangles and you really have to understand what those cost curves mean and what those demand curves mean. I think those are the highlights.

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Bowmaker: Which intellectual abilities or qualities will your course help students to develop?

Landsburg: Number one: an understanding that there is such a thing as intellectual rigor. You can’t just say anything. You have to test your ideas by translating them into some kind of formal apparatus and seeing whether they hold up. Number two: a certain amount of facility with that technical apparatus and with particular ideas, like consumer theory and producer theory. Number three: an understanding that you have to be playful if you’re going to understand anything. You can’t just learn material and parrot it back. You need to think about each problem in a creative and original way. There has to be a willingness to say, “Alright, what if we change ‘this’ assumption, what if we change ‘that’ assumption?” I’d like them to get a sense that that’s an important way of thinking about not just economics, but probably any subject they’re going to study.

Bowmaker: Where do students struggle for motivation or understanding in your course?

Landsburg: Motivation varies so much from student to student. Some students come in with a tremendous amount of motivation for understanding economics and some come in with a tremendous amount of motivation for just learning whatever’s put in front of them. It’s always, of course, tremendously satisfying when you motivate a student who didn’t expect to be motivated. And I’ve gotten, over the years, comments on evaluation forms or emails or thank you notes from students who say, “I expected to hate economics and I absolutely loved it.” That great turnaround in their motivation is the best thing that can possibly happen to a teacher. Income and substitution effects usually comes hard to them, not because it’s harder than some of the other material, but because for most of them it’s the first thing in the class that’s genuinely new to them and that requires really careful and rigorous sorting out of ideas. They have to sort out reasonably long chains of reasoning where to say “P implies Q” is the same thing as saying “not Q implies not P.” Some of them stumble on that kind of thing. Let’s say you want to prove that every Giffen good is an inferior good. So, you say, “Alright, let’s take a good and suppose it’s Giffen.” Right there, you’ve lost a certain number of them who don’t realize that if you want to prove every A is a B, you should start by assuming you’ve got an A and then proving it’s a B. So, some of them don’t grasp what I would call fundamental logic even at that level. There is also a class of students who have a great deal of difficulty grasping what deadweight loss means because it’s a loss of something that is not physical—it’s not something that they can measure with a meter stick or a clock or any other kind of measuring apparatus. Just internalizing what the meaning is of this deadweight loss is a challenge for a substantial minority of students. I always try to do a problem early on when we’re doing welfare economics where the consumer and producer surpluses overlap on the graph. I pause and say, “Wait a minute, this area here—who’s getting that? Are the consumers getting it or are the producers getting it?” I pause to let them decide whether or not that looks like a problem to them, and then I emphasize that nobody is getting areas on the graph. The consumers are getting consumer surplus, which we’re measuring with this area, and the producers are getting the producer surplus, which we’re measuring with that area—it’s just like using the same ruler to measure two different things. It’s not the areas themselves that people are getting and losing, they’re

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getting something else, which we are measuring with those areas. Unless you stress it, that point goes right by 20 percent of them. There are other examples. When I talk about giving somebody a little extra income to compensate them for a price change, a lot of students get very confused about what’s hypothetical and what’s real in the example. Are we really giving them the money or not? You need to pause and sort out stuff like that.

Bowmaker: How does your course and why does it end where it does?

Landsburg: It ends when the semester does, which is usually a week too soon. I really like to spend a good amount of time on externalities, but only about half the time do I manage to do that because the end of the semester just pops up on us.

Bowmaker: Why do you like to finish on externalities in particular?

Landsburg: Just because it’s something that interests me. I remember being very excited when I first understood the whole circle of ideas around property rights and externalities and the Coase Theorem. I think I still remember the particular things that excited me about it, and I believe I’m able to do a good job in conveying that. The idea that problems of externalities come down to the problem of property rights at some level was for me a very great insight decades ago. It’s fun to share things that were fun for you to learn. Plus, because there is so much shifting of curves and measuring of areas that reinforce a lot of ideas from earlier in the course, it’s a good thing to end on.

TEXTBOOKS

Bowmaker: You assign your textbook, Price Theory, for your course. What sets your book apart from all the other intermediate microeconomics textbooks?

Landsburg: I think it’s particularly clearly written. I think it is informed by my understanding of what points students are likely to find particularly troublesome and takes particular care to deal with those things. There are many times in that textbook where it says, “Here’s what you might be thinking we just said, but that’s not what we just said, we actually said this instead.” That is the result of having taught this stuff for a long time and seen what students tend to stumble on. And the other thing that sets that book apart, maybe more than anything else, are the problem questions, which I daresay are brilliant. They really, really test a student’s understanding in a way that I have not seen in any other microeconomics textbook.

Bowmaker: Why did you write it?

Landsburg: Probably because I was procrastinating on some other thing. But I was very excited about writing it. I wrote the whole first edition in six months. Later editions have taken me much longer and have been much less fun. But that first edition was so much fun to write because I was just really excited about explaining this stuff. I thought I had better

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ways to explain it than other people did, and I wanted to get that down on paper and share that with the world. I felt like I was on a mission.

Bowmaker: Has writing it made you a better teacher?

Landsburg: Probably—I’ve had to think harder about better ways to explain things.

TEACHING ECONOMICS IN THE FUTURE

Bowmaker: How do you think the process of teaching economics will change over the next few years and to what extent will student demands and expectations shape these changes?

Landsburg: I think the topics will change and probably ought to have changed already. Public goods, it seems to me, are an increasingly important part of the economy and should be getting more attention than they get, at least in my course. And my strong expectation is that natural monopolies are becoming an increasingly important part of the economy, so we should be spending more time on that as well. There’s been very little technological progress in the actual process of teaching. We still stand in front of a blackboard with a piece of chalk. I don’t use PowerPoint. I don’t use it because for one thing, that would entail knowing what I’m going to talk about before I walk in. There’s some office over here that advises us on how to teach and we got a memo from them last year that said that they’ve been surveying students and the students said that they learn no more from professors who use PowerPoint than professors who use blackboards. The conclusion of the memo writer was that we must not be using PowerPoint enough, which baffled me a little. Of course, everybody in every industry tells you that the way they’re doing it is the right way to do it, so I’m probably wrong, but I feel like, at least in terms of what I’m able to contribute, there’s no substitute for standing in front of a room full of human beings and interacting with them eye-to-eye and face-to-face and talking to them. That having been said, obviously the world is moving in a direction where it’s going to get easier and easier to reach large numbers of students over the Internet. Let them watch lectures at whatever time is convenient for them and reverse and fast forward and click on links or whatever. God knows what the future holds, but it’s hard to believe that somebody’s not going to figure out a way to make all that into a much better way of teaching and learning. I’m just afraid I probably won’t be part of it.

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