<p>You guys still get detention in high school?</p>
<p>Characteristics of my ideal school:
(a) Classmates are not dumb as bricks. Senior-level physics majors will not assume you can take the dot product of two matrices because “matrices and vectors are the same thing.” Classmates seek to understand the material rather than memorizing formulas for the next test. (No offense, but it’s pretty useless working with people when all they can give you is the answer.) Classmates are people I can ask for help if I’m confused about a theoretical concept. I am not the smartest person in the class.</p>
<p>(b) Professors make their lectures interesting and easy to follow. They are patient, understanding, and encourage questions. Class sizes are small enough that I can ask dumb questions during lecture without annoying 200 people. Professors are available to explain concepts during office hours, but don’t give out the answers to problem sets. Professors respect their students and do not talk down to them for making stupid mistakes or asking questions.</p>
<p>(c) Coursework is challenging, but not so challenging that I have no time to do all the reading and learn the material. The class proceeds at a speed that would allow me to learn the material on my own. Students are encouraged and expected to do reading before coming to class. Students should have time to study and partially internalize the material before starting on homework.</p>
<p>(d) I have at least two or three hours of free (nonstudy) time every night and preferably a free day every weekend.</p>
<p>(e) Homework is frequently assigned and promptly graded. For pure math classes homework should be interesting and not involve proving something that’s already been proven in the book or writing out all the properties of a normed vector space ten times. Teachers should assume we are smart and capable of original thought. For “mathematical methods” classes or classes that seek to teach you some skill (integration by parts, variation of parameters), problem sets should provide sufficient practice for us to internalize the skill and apply it to harder problems. Problem sets should have some easy (nontedious) problems on them so we can internalize the concepts before working on harder problems. (Problem sets that consist solely of a few “interesting” problems might just confuse the hell out of us. This happens a lot at Caltech. I took linear algebra there and still don’t know how to diagonalize a matrix because they only gave us one problem on it, and it was “interesting.” Maybe I should’ve taken prac math.)</p>
<p>(f) School is relatively large, with lots of things to do and people to meet. It is difficult for a student to form a reputation except within a small group of people. Students have a life outside the campus and do not confuse their college with the real world. People are nice.</p>
<p>This holds for both high school and college, but I think it’d be a lot harder to find a high school with these qualities.</p>