OK. 3.53 is an elective.
It is a technical elective in the graduate program here in the
Department of Material Science and Engineering.
That it is to say it is not a core requirement.
So that poses some different challenges for the instructor.
In a core class you have a captive audience.
The students have to take the class because it satisfies some
degree of requirement and so they are there whether they like
it or not. In 3.53, the students who are
taking 3.53 are taking it because they want to learn the
material because presumably it is of relevance to their
research. So you have the luxury of
teaching a group that is self-selected.
They want to learn the material, they are interested in
the material, and they are fairly far
advanced in their education. The view of the class is to
give students a mastery of the elements of electrochemical
processes, whether they are passive, as in the case of
corrosion, or active as in the case of electrodeposition.
And so I spend about the first 20% of the class giving sort of
my view of electrochemical processes at the atomistic level
so that students understand what the origins are of the various
kinetic parameters. And then after that the class
pretty much follows a very good textbook in the field written by
Allen Bard and Larry Faulkner on Electrochemical Methods.
And these are methods in which electrochemical techniques are
used to characterize electrochemical processes.
And we go through pretty much chapter and verse studying the
various techniques. And, on the platform that I
have erected, understanding how these
techniques differ from one another and how some of them are
superior to others in particular settings.
There is no best technique. It's sort of like asking what
is the best wine. It depends on what are you
trying to measure, to what degree of accuracy,
et cetera. And I build in a lot of time
for question and answer. And so it allows,
at some level, for me to be running what I
consider to be a clinic where students come in with their,
you know, I am having trouble in my experiment these days.
And, well, let's lay it out in front of the class and let
everybody participate. And we will learn from the
experience. OK.
This is a class that has been around for a long time.
I started teaching it in the late `80s.
Sometime after I got tenure, my department head said to me,
you know, X and Y have been alternating the teaching of
electrochemistry. It is time you took this over.
And I said, great, well, I will be sure to go talk
to them and, you know, get their take on it.
He said no, no, no, no, I don't want you
talking to them. He said I want you to start
with a clean sheet of paper, and I want you to write on that
clean sheet of paper what your vision is for a modern
electrochemistry subject in a material science department in
the last days of the 20th century.
OK. So that is what I did.
And mapped out what I thought are the key elements that need
to go into that class. And mercifully found a really
good book that would help me with the middle third of the
class as it was laid out at the time.
When I launched the class, I found that I was teaching far
too much of old style aqueous solution chemistry,
there is this Debye-Huckel model of dilute electrolytes and
a whole bunch of other things that, you know,
ultimately people don't use that much.
But the central part, the techniques,
I found that the students really wanted to learn more
about the techniques because it cemented their understanding of
kinetics and it also made use of the special ability these MIT
graduate students have with the mathematics.
So I enlarged the second part. And then the last part involves
industrial electrochemistry. And I have kept that to varying
degrees, depending on the makeup of the class.
I don't want to give the students the impression that
there is a right answer because sometimes there is plurality of
right answers. And I don't want to give the
students the impression that there is the right way to solve
the problem. There is a plurality of ways,
a plurality of approach, so I am putting forward one way
to solve the problem leading to one answer.
In many of the cases, especially in the formative
stages, it is a simple numerical problem which is basically
making sure that they know how to use the formula.
In some cases, it is not so much how do you
get the right answer. It is that you have to make a
decision between several alternatives.
And so, within adequate data and other shortcomings,
you have to make engineering judgments.
And, in some cases, the solution consists of
eliminating that which you can verify cannot be the answer.
And all of these problem-solving techniques are
valuable for engineers so they need to be cultivated.
And I guess calling the solutions model solutions or
sometimes I use the term solution outlines just starts to
nurture that idea that it is not crisp.
There is uncertainty. It is a noisy system.
And you need to master the various techniques as opposed to
say this is the answer key. 47.2, that's it.
No.