Teaching mistakes

The academic year has begun, and I’m teaching our second-year Quantum Mechanics course again. I was pretty happy with last year’s version, and the students didn’t completely disagree.

This year, there have been a few changes to the structure of the course — although not as much to the content as I might have liked (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, although I’d still love to use more of the elegant Dirac notation and perhaps discuss quantum information a bit more). We’ve moved some of the material to the first year, so the students should already come into the course with at least some exposure to the famous Schrödinger Equation which describes the evolution of the quantum wave function. But of course all lecturers treat this material slightly differently, so I’ve tried to revisit some of that material in my own language, although perhaps a bit too quickly.

Perhaps more importantly, we’ve also changed the tutorial system. We used to attempt an imperfect rendition of the Oxbridge small-group tutorial system, but we’ve moved to something with larger groups and (we hope) a more consistent presentation of the material. We’re only on the second term with this new system, so the jury is still out, both in terms of the students’ reactions, and our own. Perhaps surprisingly, they do like the fact that there is more assessed (i.e., explicitly graded, counting towards the final mark in the course) material — coming from the US system, I would like to see yet more of this, while those brought up on the UK system prefer the final exam to carry most (ideally all!) the weight.

So far I’ve given three lectures, including a last-minute swap yesterday. The first lecture — mostly content-free — went pretty well, but I’m not too happy with my performance on the last two: I’ve made a mistake in each of the last two lectures. I’ve heard people say that the students don’t mind a few (corrected) mistakes; it humanises the teachers. But I suspect that the students would, on the whole, prefer less-human, more perfect, lecturing…

Yesterday, we were talking about a particle trapped in a finite potential well — that is, a particle confined to be in a box, but (because of the weirdness of quantum mechanics) with some probability of being found outside. That probability depends upon the energy of the particle, and because of the details of the way I defined that energy (starting at a negative number, instead of the more natural value of zero), I got confused about the signs of some of the quantities I was dealing with. I explained the concepts (I think) completely correctly, but with mistakes in the math behind them, the students (and me) got confused about the details. But many, many thanks to the students who kept pressing me on the issue and helped us puzzle out the problems.

Today’s mistake was less conceptual, but no less annoying — I wrote (and said) “cotangent” when I meant “tangent” (and vice versa). In my notes, this was all completely correct, but when you’re standing up in front of 200 or so students, sometimes you miss the detail on the page in front of you. Again, this was in some sense just a mathematical detail, but (as we always stress) without the right math, you can’t really understand the concepts. So, thanks to the students who saw that I was making a mistake, and my apologies to the whole class.