Humor in the clbuttroom, formal or informal Where is balance Academic priorities

But these things can be taught in other ways, not necessarily better, but more memorably. For example, two jokes:

Joke 1: A mathematician, a physicist and engineer, old college buddies, have reunited on a bus tour of Scotland. Upon traversing a mountain pbutt, new spreading vistas open before them and the engineer exclaims, "Look! Look, the sheep in Scotland are black!"

The physicist and the mathematician shakes their heads and the physicist quietly corrects him, "No, SOME of the sheep in Scotland are black." Whereupon the mathematician groans and says, "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black ON AT LEAST ONE SIDE."

Joke 2: A mathematician, a physicist and engineer are on a game show. The host tells them they can try to win a pot full of gold. The rules are that any contestant trying for the gold will start on one side of a room with the pot of gold on the other side. At each round they can go no further than half the distance between themselves and the pot of gold in any direction of their choosing. The room is 16 feet wide, and anyone who has not reached the goal by the end of six rounds is eliminated.

The mathematician pbuttes on this one, it is clear the pot of goal will never be reached. The physicist, after some quick mental calculation, also pbuttes. The engineer asks, do I win when I can pick up the pot of gold? On being told yes, he smiles: "I'll take that challenge."

NOW, either your young students "get" the jokes or they don't. In either case, you have opportunity to explore issues of modelling, proof, computation &c in both the ivory tower and the real world senses, as well as to compare and contrast the two. The differing approaches, and their suitability to differing situations, are readily considered. And there are many more jokes of similar content available for building further discussions. Finally, I have noted that long term retention of material expressed, at least partially, in joke form is much greater, in amount retained, in amount comprehended and in length of retention, than when conveyed without jocular form -- at least for 99% of the students.

As for the utility of formal methods, I have found that having an S.B. in Theoretical Mathematics to be invaluable to me as an engineer, but that all too often the material is presented in ways that confuse and bewilder students and without any application to the problems in which they are interested. So for many people, such study has been useless -- not because of intrinsic uselessness, but because bad pedagogy and poor teaching. However, making material both interesting and relevant to the students is additional work and exposes one to greater chance of the occasional failure. (At least college students usually don't throw rotten vegetables, perhaps teaching would be better if they did ...)