Associate Professor, Physics
B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Stanford University
Bob Jacobsen, Associate Professor of Physics received his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been a staff physicist at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland and at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He has been recognized several times for his teaching and mentoring, through the Rhoda H. Goldman Award for Distinguished Faculty Advising of Undergraduates and the Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College of Chemistry. In addition to his regular teaching load, he teaches Physics 300, the Graduate Student Instructor Training course, and a Freshman Seminar, "The Stuff that Stuff is Made of." On the Physics evaluation form, the second question reads "What are your instructor's strength? (Preparation and organization of lectures, content of presentation, willingness to answer questions, attitude toward students, availability and usefulness of office hours, assignments, examinations, grading)." One student simply wrote, "All of the above." According to the Committee, "His classes are exhilarating, and his blackboard technique is astounding, like a painting."
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I'm not sure whether it's a philosophy, but here are the three principles that I try to build my teaching around.
Teach good stuff. I'm tremendously fortunate to have a subject that is both valuable and fun. Physics lets us think about what will happen in the real world. Being able to understand the real world is just immensely cool, and we must bring our enthusiasm for that into the classroom.
We should do more of this than just picking "relevent" examples to show. I want my students to have some understanding of how Galileo must have felt when he realized that Jupiter's moons move, so the heavens were not eternally unchanging. I want them to viscerally understand that they can work things out for themselves. And I want to show them that they can do that every day.
Focus on what's going on, not on specific topics. We must move beyond training students in techniques, to educating them in a way of thinking. We should be teaching our students to approach situations in the same way that practicing scholars and scientists do. "How can I understand this situation?" must often start with figuring out what principles to apply. We look at it from different angles: Where the important features and issues are, what simplifications can be justified, how this relates to what is already known and unknown, etc. Earlier approaches should be examined, and the students shown why their applicability is limited. And multiple approaches should be used, to show that they result in similar understanding, but via different routes.
By taking that approach in our teaching, we can both show students why they should learn this material, and develop their ability to use it in the future.
Not everybody understands everything all the time. Physics is a cumulative science, with new results often built on top of the old. But our courses have a tremendous amount of content and a rapid pace, so it's not possible for most students to master each piece before moving to the next. It took hundreds of years to get from Galileo to Newton. We do it in a week. Students must continuously grapple with new ideas while still trying to sort out the vocabulary we're using to express them. We have to be sensitive to what our students actually understand at each point in the course, what they only learned to do by rote, and what they find confusing.
In the end, we can't just tell students about the beauty and coherence of our understanding of the physical world. They have to see it for themselves. As teachers, our job is to keep giving the opportunities to do that in different ways, so that we can reach as many of them as we can.