Change from the Bottom up LO5222

Rol Fessenden (76234.3636@compuserve.com)
30 Jan 96 00:26:24 EST

Sb: Change from the Bottom Up LO5174

John Zavacki, commenting on watered down material says, "This could be an
interesting thread. When I am teaching, or training, my style depends
very much on the group's perceptions. There's a lot of literature out
their, I think, that deals with this, but the question of "watering down"
interests me. I once read Bertrand Russell's "The ABC's of Relativity".
You could call it watered down Einstein, but it helped me understand
relativity much more richly than any physics text. To get into the
mathematical relationships involved was not possible for me at that time,
but without them, I couldn't understand the reasoning. Russell's
understanding of the math allowed him to speak sotto voce about an
extremely complex theory and make it available to the non-physicist.

In the same way, I teach statistics to people with no college and very
little formal training in math. They need to understand the concepts, not
the derivations of the formulae or their relationships to insolubilia. Is
this watered down?"

** End Quote **

My belief is that someone who can strip away the jargon and technical
language from a subject, and present it to a non-technical audience and
have that audience understand the fundamentals is actually at the height
of their profession.

By the way, Einstein himself wrote a nice little book explaining
relativity (special and general), and he claimed anyone with high school
math could read it and understand. My impression is that he did a good
job, but I may not be the best person to decide.

--
 Rol Fessenden
 LL Bean
 76234.3636@compuserve.com