The professor emeritus of physics from MIT talks about life, teaching and open courseware.
A
s three enthusiastic APOGEE English Press reporters stood up to get their first glimpse of a wellknown academic, enter Professor Walter Lewin. As he walked into the room with a distinctive swagger in
his offbeat red-green and blue glasses, bright yellow jacket and a quirky ring on each hand, he had a
certain aura about him that screamed eccentric genius. The Film Making Club’s cameras opened shutters to embark on recoding
quite an enlightening session.
He didn’t mince his words and politely stated that of all the countries that speak English as a foreign language, including
Netherlands, the Indian accent is, by far, the worst (we are paraphrasing here). Hence, a certain third party was introduced as an
interpreter (who was, ironically, Indian) for him. The APOGEE English Press got the first crack at the professor and asked him
how his early life and education bore upon his career choice later. He went on to explain that after his doctorate in Netherlands it
was obvious to him to get into the land of academia. Given a choice between four post-doc programs, he betted on the winning
horse and teamed up with the staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When asked about his interaction with the Physics faculty of BITS Pilani, he said he assumed no particular opinion of them. As they
weren’t too keen on asking any questions (besides asking for a group selfie a la’ Oscars) he didn’t have much to say. On asked to
elaborate on what exactly the talk dealt with, he mentioned he was initially extremely apprehensive of coming and trying to lecture
the faculty on how to teach, because it’s the last thing that any teacher wants. The first words that came out of his mouth were in a
very Corleone-esque way - “over my dead body”. After clarifying that he didn’t want to impose his way of teaching on others and
modestly pointing out that many professors who weren’t like him were brilliant lecturers nonetheless, he expressed a strong dislike
for a certain Microsoft software. He exclaimed that he never commits the cardinal sin of putting up equations on PowerPoint slides
and asking students to remember them. Instead he orders them to forget them but to remember the concepts by looking at the
equations from every way possible. It is at that moment we catch a glimpse of the mad-scientist we’ve seen in the MIT lectures and
feel the love he has for physics.
Just like in life, where balance prevails, after such a deep discussion followed a mind-numbingly disgraceful and blatantly ridiculous
query from another source asking him how he completes “portions” on time. Prof Walter Lewin used this as an
opportunity to show us why he is great. He retorted by saying that while most physics teachers are content
with “covering” a certain amount of portion he prides himself in the amount he uncovers.
As the session wore on and more queries were entertained, the professor perked up when asked
about what the future of teaching holds for us, what with the advent of e-learning and online open
courseware. With a glimmer in his eye and new found enthusiasm he went on to explain how the
concept of sharing course work (started by the top institutes in America like Stanford and MIT) began to take
hold. People started to take these courses seriously and various institutes started giving
credit for these courses. But to every Ying there is a Yang. As these courses became
popular people worried more about acquiring a degree and stopped
at nothing to accomplish this. From faking identities to getting
answers from professionals, MIT Open Courseware had to
come up with ways to beat the debauchery. One instance
that exemplifies this is the algorithm that they designed
which takes into account the typing pattern, how long a
person takes to start answering after reading the question and
various other factors to identify whether it is in fact the same
person who was writing all the tests. Although the battle against
malpractice is an ongoing one, he points out that the cause is well
worth fighting for especially for countries like India – that are
aggressively adopting these free courseware avenues.
As the interview wound to a close and turned into a photo-shoot
with the man who espoused physics - the man who gazed upon
nothing except the subject itself as inspiration, those who
feared what this evening would hold for them came to realize
it was time more than well spent.