First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
Interpretation
Understanding your motivations in teaching helps shape effective methods and outcomes.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes the importance of establishing clear intentions behind teaching a subject. By identifying why you want students to learn and what essential knowledge they should acquire, you can intuitively select methods that will effectively engage them and facilitate their understanding.
In practice
During a teacher training workshop to discuss effective teaching strategies.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
Coaching is the great passion of my life, and the job to me has always been an opportunity to work with our student athletes and help them discover what they want.
I'm very passionate about political issues, but I also think that listening to people who disagree is extremely important, and I try to build that into my teaching, sometimes by co-teaching with rightwing colleagues.
I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.