Guessing the Teacher's Password

Someone should write a book like the little schemer but for physics. One of the best classes I took in college was somewhat like this. We measured the period of the pendulum using our heartbeats, and we also measured how long it took things to roll down differently sloped ramps. From this we derived the period of the pendulum and the relationship between slope and speed. Eventually we used this to derive the universal law of gravitation using the period of the moon's orbit as the only given. It was pretty cool because there was no math involved. Instead of using calculus to derive the equations, we instead found them inductively by iterating over a couple thousand lines in excel and then looking for the pattern. The idea of the class was to understand physics by deriving all the equations the same way the people who discovered them did. It was pretty cool.

I spend some of my time teaching at a private university. During a discussion with one student he said, "All I really know about Plato is that he thought the forms were transcendent whereas Aristotle thought the forms were immanent."<p>"Oh," said I, "that's interesting. What does it mean for a form to be transcendent or immanent?"<p>"I don't know, I just know that's what they thought."<p>We then had a discussion about whether or not he really knew that, and whether or not he was OK with paying over $25k a year to learn how to be a parrot.<p>The sad thing: he was OK with it, and probably rightly so. He realized that mostly what people want are parrots and you can get paid quite a decent amount of money for being a good parrot. Not a bad gig if you're fine being a cog. There are certain comforts it provides.

This sadly is how the world works. In school, even in high school and college, the students who guess the teacher's password are rewarded. The (few) students who make an effort to discover and think through something on their own are criticized for wandering from the beaten path, even on the occasions when they're actually right.<p>High school science competitions (school science fairs, all the way upto Siemens-Westinghouse and Intel STS) particularly guilty of this.

overcomingbias is one of those websites you should read every article in, like paul graham's essays

I remember the first time I got an F on an assignment even though I'd gotten the correct answer to every problem.<p>I hadn't reached my correct answers the "right" way.

I've been thinking along similar lines since I've been interviewing; far too many interviewers are only looking for the password.

Only tangentially related, but years ago, in elementary school, I decided to guess the password after the school restricted access to SimCity. I got it right on the first try, it was just the school name, but I told everyone 'I hacked it', for major props.