Political Briefs
End of Jan. 26 Column

MIT Era Ends

I was lucky; I had Prof. Bernard "Bernie" Feld (of the Manhattan project) as my physics professor, and I was one of a class of a dozen students. I never had to go to freshman physics (8.01) lectures in 10-250, as described in this article. If you will, I had TEAL in 1970. But now everyone gets it: At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard, according to the New York Times. Apparently, some students object. I can't imagine why. I'd have never have passed physics as a lecture course; in fact, I flunked 18.02, second-term calculus, three times because I never understood it from either the large lectures in 10-250 or the small tutorials. If Nixon hadn't bombed Haiphong harbor in the spring on 1972 (unleashing demonstrations on campuses all over America), I would never have passed 18.02, and would never have graduated.