Effective Teaching: A Workshop

Abstract

One of my favorite leisure-time activities is to walk down the hall and listen to classes in progress, hoping to get some teaching tips. I've got some time this morning—come along with me and let's see what we can pick up. There's Professor Frobish—he's got the junior fluids course this semester. Frobish: “...and on Monday we saw that if you write the coupled partial differential equations of change for this pseudoplastic fluid flowing in a cloverleaf-shaped channel and impose the usual singular perturbation theory boundary conditions you can easily prove that the liquid will emerge at the outlet as long as the pipe is tilted downward." Student: “Professor Frobish.” Frobish: “That result by itself is of course only mildly interesting but Monday was the first day of class and I wanted to start slowly. Now today we'll see what happens if we relax some of those simplifying assumptions. Suppose, for example, we say that instead of a pseudoplastic fluid we have a virial gas moving at sonic velocity and the channel is made of expandable rubber and is mounted on a satellite in a decaying orbit. Now if we invoke a six-dimensional stress tensor we can easily see that...”