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My name's Mike Short, and I'm a professor here in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.
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I'm a material scientist, specifically a metallurgist.
I look at things like microstructure,
defects, material properties, and how
they interplay with each other.
But my application area and focus
is on making nuclear power work.
I was a student here, both undergraduate and graduate.
We all played a lot of text based
role playing games and things.
And there was always these two categories:
intelligence and wisdom.
And as a student, I was like, well,
they both seem to be correlated with how well your wizard can cast spells.
I don't quite understand the difference.
It's teaching here that made me realize the difference.
In liquid light.
Awesome.
That intelligence is the raw stuff.
The sort of speed at which you can update.
Wisdom is the background, the foundation of knowledge
on which you build.
And you need them both to make impact.
As a classroom instructor, I try and take
raw stuff, MIT students who are absolutely brilliant,
and through the lens of my own experience
and the questions that they answer,
I can try to get inside their head
and get them to latch onto concepts more
quickly and in a more practically realizable way.
I teach the Intro to Nuclear Physics class.
...Nucleons, as a function of their mass...
It can be dry.
When you're talking about things that nobody has ever
directly seen before, nuclear shell structures, protons
and neutrons themselves, we only see indirect evidence
of their presence and of their levels
through radioactive decay, through bubble chambers
or cloud chambers and particle tracks and things.
You're teaching students to use inference
from what they can observe to what they can actually infer.
That's a hard thing to grasp.
I like providing experiences that help them get it with
pieces of themselves, where the students can see themselves
in their science and in their problem sets.
You may have heard of the now infamous toenail lab, where
at the beginning of each class, I ask my students
for their toenail clippings.
We send them into our nuclear reactor,
let them cook for about an hour.
We then count the gamma rays being emitted after beta decay.
Some people have had uranium in their toenails.
One student had a tremendous amount of gold
in their toenails.
And my first reaction was I thought you'd
have cleaned the polish off.
And the student said, I did, but I
live in the Badlands in South Dakota
where the water's all run off from gold mines.
Proof that you are what you eat and drink.
COVID in 2020 presented quite a challenge
to keeping that MIT quality teaching product.
These are the Geiger counter kits that we sent.
Everything ready to build.
A do it yourself Geiger counter.
It senses gamma radiation or high energy photons.
I felt at the beginning, the most important thing
to keep students engaged was to project to them
that we are keeping you engaged at full level,
and at the same time, being empathetic about harder
studying environments.
You're going to be stuck at home.
You might have financial pressures.
You might have emotional pressures.
This is a stressful time.
So we brought more energy than usual to the course.
We were infinitely available.
This light board behind me mattered a lot.
In fact, I'm kind of dreading going back to the blackboard.
Because when you're at the blackboard
you got your backs to the students.
I realized during this pandemic I don't think that lecture
has a place anymore.
If the lectures can be recorded and that's
the preferred mode of prep for students, then offload that.
Getting a world expert to answer your questions in your language
with the way that makes sense in your head, that's
the value of an MIT education, not performance art.