I remember he said something like ‘this should be completely obvious to you’, and to me that was crushing… we had a conversation after the mid-term e… - David Franklin

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I remember he said something like ‘this should be completely obvious to you’, and to me that was crushing… we had a conversation after the mid-term exam, in which the class had averaged 20 out of 90. It was 25 years ago, and I still remember what he said: ‘Frustration is necessary for learning. This idea that you can enjoy learning is a very American idea’.” Dan pauses, the memory of that conversation etched on his face. “I felt so offended by that claim. My professor felt that to learn, you had to push yourself. One of my dreams was to go back to Venezuela[7] and start a university, and I vowed that I would write in the walls of the university that frustration was not necessary for learning.

David Franklin
Invisible Learning: The magic behind Dan Levy's legendary Harvard statistics course
English
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About David Franklin

David Franklin is an art historian with expertise in Italian Renaissance art, a curator, and a former art museum director.

Biography information from Wikipedia

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On the whiteboard in Dan’s office, he has written in bold black marker the phrase ‘TEACHING ≠ LEARNING’. He believes that most lecturers pay too much attention to what they are doing in a class. Planning is important, and professors are right to spend time in advance thinking about how the class will be structured. One downside, though, is that professors will often evaluate themselves against what they said they would do in the plan. If they covered the material without tripping up, and gave the right explanations at the right time, they will be happy about how the class went.

Maximising enjoyment All students want to enjoy their classes. This simple truth means that teachers who can make learning fun will, other things equal, be more successful. If the only way students can enjoy themselves is to ignore the class and play on their phones, then student enjoyment is a headwind that slows the boat’s progress. By making learning fun, teachers can adjust the sails to take advantage of the wind and speed the boat up. The progress it makes may not be directly towards our destination, but we can use the sails nonetheless to pick up speed and get closer to it than we would otherwise have done.

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Exams also give us a concrete example of Dan’s attempts to promote understanding over memorization. He encourages students to bring with them a ‘cheat sheet’, which can include anything they want. He does not want students being tested on whether they can remember the formula for the standard error of a distribution, and does not believe that it will be helpful for them to do so. Allowing cheat sheets means that students can bring more than just formulas with them: if they were struggling with a topic, they could bring all sorts of pre-cooked explanations to help them with the exam questions. In turn, this acts as an extra incentive to Dan to set questions that rely on a deeper understanding.

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