My personal low came in Real Analysis a few semesters later. I could not follow the professor in part of a proof he was doing at the board. As I sat formulating my question, the guy in front of me asked the question I wished to ask. Professor X turned, paused, and witheringly suggested, “If you don’t understand that, perhaps you should be in life sciences.” I closed my notebook, took a mental inventory of drink specials at various campus bars, and never returned to the class again.

Tied for first – Murray McGibbon – Acting 2. Learned more in that class about life than any other class period.

Grad School – Jeff Rush – Scene Analysis. Always chaotic, but always enjoyable. I can now carefully dissect structure in story and understand how a story really works.

“First, the professor was absolutely enthusiastic about the material; they weren’t just punching a clock, they were truly into it. Second, a very delicate balance was struck, in which the material was ultimately understandable (and interesting, it goes without saying), but also extremely challenging.”

Only half the class was in the leas tbit intimately familiar with the material to start with, but through implementing peer review throughout the year we all learned so much – no one was left behind.

It was absolutely bonkers, and I’m surprised they let us do it. But everyone finished, and everyone loved the course!

Remedial Writing, given as a summer course at Ithaca College by Prof. Barb Adams. I was a 17-year old kid so eager to get into college that I jumped in four days after graduating from high school and took what classes I could find in the summer offering (which meant finding ones which had no prerequisits). This one was a real gem. Four students and a braless, feminist professor who raised goats (this was early 1970′s) to make goat cheese, knew her stuff, and cared about teaching. She was also willing to hang out after class and talk about most anything. I learned more useful things about writing (and reading) in that single condensed 6-week class than in anything before or since.

Why was it effective? No pressure from the teacher, just help. All of us students were there because we really wanted to learn. Lot’s of in-class practice — write for 5 or 15 minutes, read out loud, listen to constructive feedback from the others — not much lecutre, lots of good reading assignments. The 4:1 ratio was a huge plus. I remember much laughter and some real tear-jerking moments.

Heck, that was more than 30 years ago and comes to mind like yesterday.

A close second was UChicago’s Honors Analysis sequence, which was taught by Rhagavan Narasimhan when I took it. Narasimhan covered analysis on metric spaces, basic operator algebra, complex analysis, and differential forms and elementary differential topology in the space of a year. Every class I’ve taken since has been easy by comparison.

But the most important, influential, and really really fun class I’ve ever had was a Physics/Philosophy cross-listed undergrad course on the QM measurement problem, taught by David Albert at Columbia. I took it as a German Lit major and it drove me right back into science, where I happily live today.

And Sean’s undergrad GR course was awesome. Especially for being the first time through (at the U of C, at least). Such a pity my alma mater lost him.

While we’re on the U of C, I have to concur with the above mention of Paul Sally. Amazing teacher. I actually threw away the textbook after the class (not Rudin, don’t remember the author) and LaTeX’d my notes to make my own real analysis book.

One thing I found in grad school is I enjoyed the astronomy classes vastly more than the physics classes, despite a wide variety of teachers in both. The astronomy faculty treated the grad students as colleagues – junior colleagues, to be sure, but colleagues nonetheless. The physics faculty treated us like boot camp recruits. Makes a world of difference.

And I’ll just say, what a pity is it when a brilliant researcher can’t teach to save his life. Bardeen, Bardeen…

He would begin lecturing as soon as his body broke the plain of the doorway. No notes. Ever. Armed only with a piece of chalk he would conduct us through long, treacherous & profound theorems like a symphony, with every epsilon and delta in its perfect place. After the final exam, I was ready to tackle the Riemann hypothesis, but I was distracted by this girl…

Though ok, from a more academic, sterile viewpoint I guess the class that I remember best and influenced my life the most was freshman kinematics. I had my first-ever “this is so friggin cool, I am going to jump up and down from excitement” moment there, the professor was so enthusiastic about physics that I ended up working for him in his lab based on that alone, and it essentially made me a physics major.

As a gradute student, Sasha Kashlinsky gave an amazing series of lectures about
various topics in astrophysics. I almost remember word for word the one he gave about the negative heat capacity of gravity and its consequences.

Going to a real autopsy was pretty wicked too. Whole new meaning to a ‘wet’ lab.

In terms of making the biggest impression on me, the best class in grad school I took was Scott Dodelson’s Radiative Transfer in Astrophysics class. If you think E+M is boring, it’s because of the evil known as Jackson. Scott made E+M as fun as you could get. He has a very physical style, focusing more on gaining intuition then the dreary derivation of equations line-by-line. I still refer to my old notes that I took in his class once in a while (especially when I read ApJ papers.)

I just took Nick’s GR class this spring. We used your book and his old handwritten notes, both of which were great. But it was the lectures which were truly remarkable…incredibly fast-paced, but just slow enough that you could follow, on a good day. I was particularly impressed with the ease with which the mathematics was introduced, explained, and incorporated. I am in complete agreement that his course was the best science class I have ever taken…but not the best class in general.

I took one course taught by Jim Kincaid about the breakdown of common sense. Though not as intellecutally challenging as GR was, this course somehow managed to change my entire outlook on the world. I think that, in general, science courses don’t allow for this type of far-reaching influence. They are too concerned with specifics, and, while undeniably interesting and important, can’t have a broad impact on a person’s philosophy. Taken as a whole, an education in science can surely have a remarkable influence on somebody’s worldview, but I think that a single course rarely has this ability.

Not really a coincidence.

To excerpt from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_B._Leighton

Robert B. Leighton (September 10, 1919–March 9, 1997) was an American physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology. His bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees were all from Caltech; he joined the faculty in 1949. His Principles of Modern Physics 1959 was a standard textbook. After Richard Feynman’s Lectures in Physics course, in the early-1960s, Leighton spent over two years reworking the tape-recorded text into publishable form: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which were published in 1964 and 1966, and which have enjoyed perennial success ever since…. Leighton retired from teaching in 1990…. One of his sons, Ralph Leighton, also collaborated with Feynman on several books.

Hitoshi still pops up frequently on the web with general lectures on ATLAS. While reading the slides, I try to replay in my mind the way he’d lecture them. (On an unrelated note, I’ve never caught him laughing before!)