Question: What’s your favorite thing about your job ?

Mossy answered on 5 Nov 2018:

Hi again. I guess I’ll give you an example. I try, whenever I am teaching, to help students think for themselves and reason things out. I do this by (hopefully) well-timed and structured questioning. This is instead of just telling people the answer. So one of my favorite moments ever teaching was about 10 years ago when I sat down with a group of students who were all working on a problem I’d set about how to play baseball on the moon. Now, this is a famous problem to ask students because most people will say “Oh if you are on the moon, you should use a heavier ball”. In fact, you shouldn’t – the acceleration due to gravity is the same regardless of the mass of the ball. Anyway, some students were thinking about it and there was one student who was on the cusp of realizing that a heavier ball wouldn’t work. Her friend however, wasn’t sure and so they were having a bit of a discussion about it. Anyway, all I did was remind them that Galileo said that all objects fall at the same rate and asked them to explain to me what they thought it means. Without saying anything else they realized that the heavier ball wouldn’t work, and went on to solve the problem really quickly after that.