UW Gazette, May 28, 1997
     
     'I find teaching is an art, more than a science," says
Dr. John Smith says. A professor of physics, he has
accumulated a large body of evidence to support this
statement: he's been teaching undergraduates at UW for 33
years.
     For the most part, he has taught basic physics to very
large classes, hundreds of students at a time. Using a
direct, clear style of presentation, he turns the
abstractions of science into mind-pictures that make sense.
      He's reached hundreds more through distance education
courses in electronics. When Dr. Jim Leslie floated an idea,
nearly 30 years ago, to make correspondence courses more in
teresting and effective through the use of audiotapes, he
started small. Smith was one of the original "group of four"
professors recruited to tape their lectures.
     That was in 1968, and he's stayed with the program ever
since. While the materials are the same as those used in
regular courses, the psychology of teaching scattered
individuals, in widely varying circumstances, is quite dif
ferent. Students have called him from places as far away as
Little Slave Lake, where a generator was used to power the
electronics in the UW course kit.
     Even the mysteries of chaos, his current field of
research, begin to come clear when Smith talks. Chaos
fascinates students, he says. To demonstrate its problems,
he built an ingenious little brass and copper machine with a
pendulum that can be adjusted to swing irregularly. A
computer plots the pendulum's swing at one point in the
drive. If it were swinging regularly, the monitor would show
only a dot. But because chaos has no underlying pattern,
each point is separate.
     Perhaps what fascinates students most is that when
enough points are registered, the resulting PoincarŽ Plot
takes the shape of a spiral galaxy - a pattern called,
appropriately, a "strange attractor".
     He cites example after example of chaos in everyday
life: population patterns of foxes and rabbits, a dribbling
basketball, the stutter of a dying heart. As he talks he
demonstrates: bouncing the ball, miming the swing of the
pendulum. He hardly needs the chaos machine to make physics
come alive.
     Last year, under the auspices of the Canadian
Association of Physicists, Smith brought chaos to undergrads
at seven universities across Canada.
     The only time he doesn't enjoy teaching is when
students are quiet and uninvolved. "Without interaction you
don't know whether they're just bored or they don't
understand," he says. Luckily, it doesn't happen too often.
     "Years ago I had a group like that, and it was really a
struggle. Then, for some reason I started talking about
Monty Python. And somehow I just got it right. So, every
lecture we'd spend five minutes talking about Monty Python."
     He didn't repeat the stratagem, though. He has no
tricks, no formulae. "I don't tell jokes, like some people.
I think the best way is just to get to know the students:
figure out how to respond to what they want, even when they
don't know they want it. When you get right down to it, most
people really want to learn."