Richard P. Feynman on Teaching

I DON'T believe I can do without teaching. The reason is that I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere, I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I'm making some contribution"--it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s, I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think alone, OK? So they don't get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this, a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there is not enough real activity and challenge: You are not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think about how to answer the students' questions. Nothing!

There are moments when everything is going well in any thinking process, and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, so it's the world's greatest pain in the neck. And then there are the longer periods when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say, "I'm teaching my class."

If you teach a class, you can think about the elementary things you know well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you think of something new, you're pleased to have a new perspective.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't harm me to think about them again and see if I can go further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

Quotes from ``Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!'' pp. 165-6. 

Sources: 

Feynman on Teaching (utah.edu) 

My Top 10 Richard Feynman Quotes - Broc Pacholik 

O Americano, Outra Vez! - Richard P. Feynman (southerncrossreview.org)