Top 15 David Goodstein Quotes

There are 25,000 high schools in the United States... and the number of qualified high school physics teachers... in the range of 2,000 to 4,000. So most high schools do not have anybody qualified... and physics is taught in most high schools. ...Many of the so-called crossover teachers, who were teaching physics but weren’t trained ...were teachers. Home economics had fallen out of favor.

[N]obody ever made a million dollars on .
Five years after the series went public, we got a letter ...saying, "You’ve crossed the threshold. You now share in the revenues." ...But by then, there were no more revenues. ...I didn’t care ...That wasn’t the purpose ...Later on, we applied to the for an additional $3 million to turn out a high school version ...without calculus.

Sally told me... it cost about $75,000 to make a half-hour program. ...[T]he original grant was for $750,000. We eventually got $6 million... [P]art of the proposal... was to make a pilot program that cost hundreds of thousands... and took three years... And that was a make-or-break—either they accepted the pilot program or the project was dead. ...It became the second program in the series... "The Law of Falling Bodies." ...this absolutely beautiful pilot program ...which cost $350,000 ...everybody loved it and they said, “Go ahead.” ...And that meant ...classy computer animation and ...actors ...We did all kinds of things you just don’t do in educational television.

[I]t was no longer a television camera at the back of the room. It was now a production, with programs, and all the production values... [I]t... evolved into something far beyond anything I had imagined.

I... remember one morning at... breakfast, reading the ... story that had given $10 million a year for fifteen years to make telecommunications materials for higher education. ...[H]e created ...the Annenberg CPB Foundation ...to give out Annenberg’s money. ...I ...got in touch with Sally Beaty and ...KCET ...and we wrote a proposal. ...KCET ...was on the verge of going belly-up. And they tried to load the entire overhead of the station on our project. ...[W]e got the award—with KCET not involved. ...[N]ow we had no flagship station, but we had the money ...

So I went to Murph... and he said, "I’ll give you a little money to look into it." ...I think $50,000—and I hired... Don Delson... head of AV... to be my assistant... We learned all kinds of things...

I taught Physics 1... [b]ut not from the Feynman books ...We used some conventional textbook ...but I sort of redesigned the course. ...By the time I started teaching it the second time, I started to get worried, because... I would go on teaching the same course forever... [or] I would leave it and somebody else would teach it and it would become a completely different course... One way of preserving memory is to write a textbook, but I had already written States of Matter...been there, done that. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me that television was bound to play some role in the future of education. ...What I vaguely had in mind was that the lecture could be taped by a television camera at the back of the room.

Robbie... asked me to create the new physics course—at least the first year of the new physics course. And I said, “Robbie, when you were chair of the faculty, you asked for complete teaching relief. Now I’m going to be chair... and you’re giving me the hardest teaching job in the whole institution. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?" We... cut a deal... full financial support for a postdoc so I could hire somebody to help me on my research group while I was doing all this.

When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them.

The high-school editions... video modules, averaging 15 minutes... are accompanied by extensive written materials for the teacher, including suggestions, background material, demonstrations, and sample questions... [T]eachers are willing to work very hard to improve their skills... given reasonable support, and... even teachers who are well qualified... find new inspiration in... TMU.

The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence.

The problem of how to present detailed mathematical derivations is confronted... in the animated scenes. ...The comprimise solution... invented while designing the pilot program, is called the "algebraic ballet." ...done in detail, but rapidly and entertainingly. The viewer was not expected to absorb every detail... [b]ut every step was displayed... [A]ttention is never lost during these [rapid] mathematical passages.

[A] program is devoted to Millikan's oil-drop experiment, partly as an application of Newton's second law, and... to induce... philosophical ideas about how science is... done. ...The solution ...create a ..."Millikan Museum" ...in the Norman Bridge Laboratory where he had worked. The set involved thousands of artifacts, many ...Millikan's own ...After ...shooting ...the museum was disassembled, to live on only on videotape.

[T]he earlier Feynman course had sought to makes physics exciting by relating... to contemporary... problems. The new course took the opposite tack... to recreate the historical excitement of the original discovery. ...[C]lassical mechanics ...is treated as the discovery of "our place in the universe." ...[I]ts climax is Newton's solution of the . ...[H]istorical recreations ...became a staple of the project.

[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher.