Teaching: To Profess with a Passion

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Taskmaster. In a sense—computers, films, labs and TV notwithstanding—nothing much has come along in 2,400 years that essentially improves the Socratic pattern of a learned man plus a group of students, but the pattern can work out in sharply varied and instructive styles. None of TIME'S ten teachers, for example, court popularity, but none go farther in scorning it than Amherst's Arnold Arons, 49, who has created a demanding course in math and physics that all freshmen must take. He flunks more frosh than any other Amherst prof, barks "You are an idiot" at boys who were high school valedictorians. An arbitrary egotist, he has inspired student dart boards on which his photograph is the bull's-eye. Arons' scathing answer to his student critics is that "they create certain myths to rationalize their own inadequacies." He seems proud of some mementos from his students in his cluttered office: a dead lizard, a hangman's noose.

Arons' sweeping course ranges from Galileo and Faraday to Voltaire and John Stuart Mill. He starts his lectures by locking the door at the opening bell —to encourage promptness, he says; to keep the kids from fleeing, they say. As he carefully shows how a scientific theory can affect man's own view of himself, and requires students to explain such notions as velocity and inertia in their own words, the relevance hits them. The course, recalls Amherst Graduate Evan Snyder, "was absolute hell—but one of the most valuable intellectual experiences I've been through." One student slipped a note under Arons' door, reading "I can't help wondering if physics is really as interesting as you make it seem."

One of his aims, says Arons, is to help students realize that science does not have absolute answers, that "it is a creation of human imagination and intelligence like everything else we do." Arons requires many essays of his students, considers this "feedback" vital to good teaching. "You can't just get up there and say something crisply and clearly and think that it has registered," he says. He has been personally grading papers for 20 years, and "almost every session I learn something new about the obstacles that arise in the students' minds." To their amazement, those students who muster enough courage to ask his help have found Arons pleased, patient, and wholly effective in overcoming obstacles.

Later-Life Influence. At Columbia, Historian Dwight Miner, 61, carries with zest and buoyancy the weighty responsibility of teaching that college's long-famed course in contemporary civilization, following the tracks of such illustrious predecessors as Rexford Guy Tugwell and Jacques Barzun. Creeping, leaping, lolling his head like a cow, he tries to span everything from the Magna Carta to World War II.