College: Teaching from Feynman
THE FEYNMAN LECTURES on physics are widely recognized as invaluable source books for teachers and prospective textbook authors, but there is less unanimity regarding suitability of the published lectures as textbooks for students. (For example, two excellent reviews and a different evaluation have appeared.) I am reporting on the two years at Williams College during which my introductory course students and I worked with the first volume. I had the privilege of attending Richard Feynman's lectures at Cal Tech before volume 1 existed, and my perspective is inevitably affected by this experience and the fact that I adopted as textbook for the present term “Mechanics,” Volume 1 of the Berkeley Physics Course. This text was adopted primarily to effect smoother transition to “Electricity and Magnetism” by E. M. Purcell (volume 2 of the Berkeley series), which had just been selected for the sophomore course.