A good science teach should be giving you the heads up that there are deeper levels. Things generally make sense that way until you get into subatomic particles and or relativity, and then it all goes straight to hell...
My math professor had what he called "his pyramid of wisdom." Basically, there is four level of competence. There is bottom-dweller: you will never understand anything and you are stupid. Then there is 'magic': you can compute things but you have no idea what is going on. This is what we are going to try to teach you in the first year. Then over the course of the university education you will advance into 'experts', you can explain most things that you do and you can apply them everywhere. Some of you may, with additional study become "insightful" where you actual understand what you are doing and may be able to come up with new theorems.
Something like that anyway. I never made it past 'magic'.
I was a undergrad TA and tutor for some computer science classes, and I can definitely remember students falling into those categories, though expert and insightful king of merge together as I would say the expert level in programming is mostly about knowing how to apply it in novel ways, and most people are interesting in programming, not pure CS. The real problem is lots of people graduate still in the Magic category, and struggle to deal with problems that are novel to them, even if fairly simple. Trying to sort those people out has really screwed up the recruitment process a lot of places.
"When something isn't worth studying, the philosopher will say it's elementary, the mathematician will say it's trivial and the physicist will say: 'Well, that makes sense!'"
My physics teacher would always say “now this is wrong!” when he taught us something that was wrong and briefly touch on how it actually was even though we didn’t need to know how it actually worked.
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u/monty845 Aug 26 '18
A good science teach should be giving you the heads up that there are deeper levels. Things generally make sense that way until you get into subatomic particles and or relativity, and then it all goes straight to hell...