User:Yom Mulroy/sandbox

During Charles Ferster's brief tenure at Georgetown University he utilized a very novel and effective teaching technique. He attracted a large class taught in a big lecture hall. He never directly spoke to the class. All instruction was conveyed through teaching assistants. The class relied entirely on a book written by Ferster. It was given out in batches of chapters as it had not yet been formally published. Each chapter was quite short consisting of only about three to five pages. The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The students were expected to read two or three chapters between classes. On arriving at class the students were given wind up timing clocks. Each student would alternately explain the contents of a chapter to another student. The explanations were timed and could take no more than three minutes for the student to receive credit for the chapter. The explanations were made quite easy by the fact that the student was allowed to have the chapter open in front of him while making the explanation. Understandably, few students ever failed to give an adequate explanation of a chapter during the allotted three minutes. The students, in turn, audited other students' presentations. To achieve an "A" one needed only to complete all the chapters. At first glance one such an easy learning method might seem completely ineffective. This was not the case. After finishing their presentations, most of the students would hang around discussing the lessons.. Fifty years later I remember what I learned in Ferster's class better than what I learned in any other class at the time. Occasionally a teaching assistant would show a movie to the class prior to our auditing of each other. One movie, in particular, was very impressive. It showed the results of a project during which Ferster had taught gorillas to count using binomial numbers entered on hand held calculators. A number of chickens were let into the room containing the Gorilla. The Gorilla would count the chickens and enter the number on his calculator. Next the first chickens were removed and a new batch was let in. By some cues which I don't remember, the gorilla would either add the new number of chickens to the previous number, or subtract the number, or even multiply the original number of chickens. The only failing of the experiment was that the gorillas could not be taught long division. Ferster himself spent most of his time in a large laboratory across from the lecture hall. The lab was filled with pigeon cages in which pigeons were pecking at targets and given food rewards based on various conditioning routines. Since solid state technology had not yet taken hold the experiments were controlled from an adjacent room filled with vacuum tube circuits, and mazes of wiring. The rewards were activated by servo mechanisms like those of pinball machines. Both the lab and the control room were filled with incessant clicking. Any time of the day or evening you would find Ferster watching his pigeons and taking notes in an ever present notebook with a curious, serious look on his face. During his rare appearances in the lecture hall he would walk silently around the room with his notebook observing the students auditing one another. . . making notes with the same look on his face that he gave to his pigeons.