Pop, the Question
S8-E56
“A Burning Yearning for Learning”
Episode Summary
Learning should be fun, so Pop, the Question turns the mic on an evolving pedagogy where college professors find ways to bring plenty of “razzle dazzle” to the classroom. This includes innovative projects, collaboration, and discourse. And, as is the case for this episode’s guest, it means the incorporation of plenty of pop cultural references: the wisdom of Skeletor; the intersection of Prince’s music with mathematical fractals like the Mandelbrot set; and even lessons learned from classic Shakespeare plays. Host Dr. Melinda Lewis partners with Dr. Steven Weber, Drexel University academic leader and longtime friend of Pennoni Honors College, for a playful conversation about new and inspired ways of teaching and learning.
Featured Guest Steven Weber, PhD (Vice Provost for Undergraduate Curriculum and Education; Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering)
Host and Producer Melinda Lewis, PhD (Director of Strategy)
Dean Neville Vakharia, PhD
Former Dean Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD
Executive Producer Erica Levi Zelinger (Director, Marketing & Media)
Producer Brian Kantorek (Associate Director, Marketing & Media)
Event Coordinator Rachel James (Program Manager, Undergraduate Research & Enrichment Programs)
Research and Script Melinda Lewis, PhD
Audio Engineering and Editing Brian Kantorek
Original Theme Music Brian Kantorek
Production Assets Noah Levine
Social Media Outreach Natalie Rebelo
Graphic Design Brianna Cordova
Logo Design Michal Anderson
Additional Voiceover Malia Lewis
Recorded February 7, 2024 in 155 Bentley Hall, Pennoni Honors College, Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA, USA).
Copyright © 2024 Drexel University
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Welcome to Pop, the Question, a podcast that exists at the intersection of pop culture and academia. We sit down and talk about our favorite stuff through the lenses of what we do and who we are from Pennoni Honors College, Drexel University, Dr Melinda Lewis here, I'm your host. We're here with Steven Weber, professor in electrical and computer engineering, as well as Vice Provost for Undergraduate curriculum in education. And we've talked in the past about learning and teaching and why we love it, and we're going to continue that discussion here about how we try to make learning fun in higher education. Let's get cooking.
Dr. Steven Weber
Awesome, glad to be here.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
We have talked a lot about learning as fun, which I don't know if people still think of those as synonymous. I do, but I'm wondering when you connected that learning was fun, or maybe even school was fun.
Dr. Steven Weber
Yeah, I was a average but somewhat indifferent student in high school. I had this conception of college before I started as this unreachable height, and, you know, robed scholars, and I, how could I possibly, like, fit in that environment? And then I came onto campus, and the bright moment was like, Oh, that's not what it is like. It's, this is a community of learners. And I instantly, in a very visceral way, felt at home even at 17, like, first week of campus. Oh yeah, this is where I want to be, whether on this side of the desk or the other. I think I found where I want to be.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Good answer, like, the way you think I'm gonna be watching you. care, you know, to kind of give it even more crisp example of a moment,
Dr. Steven Weber
it was a class called Introduction to Computer Graphics. Like, how do you actually program a computer to make pictures? But we ended up talking about something called fractals. And fractal is a mathematical object that produces these beautiful, intricate figures. And if you've heard of the Mandelbrot set, I'm interested Mandelbrot being a famous mathematician from the 20th century who discovered, in a sense, this godfather of all fractals, many fractals, but this is like the main one. So I programmed in this class the little script to produce this picture on our dot matrix printer from back in the day, and it came out, it was just this amazing sense of discovery for me, not that I was one who discovered it, but I was being, you know, that's part of what you do in education, is you help the students gain that sense of discovery and ownership of the material. And then it was like later that year, the former artist known as Prince Yeah. Had a club called First Avenue in Minneapolis, and I was there dancing with some friends, yeah, and they had graphics up on the big wall, right? Because, you know, just like we do at a club, and then they showed the Mandelbrot set, right? And I'm, you know, I'm doing my bad dancing, right? And I just stop and I point at the wall. Hey, it's the Mandelbrot.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
That's incredible. So it was like, this, just imagine Record scratch exactly some merchants. And it was finally my dream. Somebody recognized my vision.
Dr. Steven Weber
Yeah, I mean, there was no none of that. That would have been awesome, of course. But it was more like everyone around what's wrong with this guy? But for me, it was like, Oh my gosh, this is random connection. You don't expect to see mathematical instruction found in a nightclub. Don't stop dancing. Learning was fun, and I had great professors. A big part of what made my undergraduate experience so wonderful was I was in an honors program. So here we have the Honors College. This was just honors program, but nonetheless, I took the classes in the Honors Program. My friends were in the Honors Program, and there was a sense of interest in and dedication to school, right? We took school seriously, but also got a lot out of it. But also there's big social components, so I kind of am a believer in pay it forward, and I consider myself a friend of the college. Being a friend of the college, for me is kind of paying it forward and getting to participate in the wonderful community that Drexel has in the pennodi College is kind of me reconnecting with that important part of my life.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in the sense that I thought college was going to be like it was in movies, and it didn't turn out to be. It turned out much better because I felt like, Oh, my brain is stimulated in a way that wasn't like in high school
Dr. Steven Weber
paper chase or other films.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
No, I was thinking of PCU starring Jeremy. So we're working on very different levels.
Unknown Speaker
Here's all you need to know classes, nothing before 11 beer. It's your best friend. You drink a lot of it. Women, your freshmen. So it's pretty much out of the question. It's a whole new ball game on campus these days, and they call it PC,
Dr. Melinda Lewis
National Lampoon. And thinking like, Man, there are gonna be just so many Hi Jinks. Yes, don't know there were fewer Hi Jinks than you expected. More Hi Jinks
than what was happening. But also thinking of this, because a cool creative space. But by, I think the time I went through high school, I was so bogged down by like, the rules of like, this is what an English paper looks like, and this is what and I feel like the blossoming was realizing when faculty would be like, actually, you can do so much more. Like the five paragraph essay doesn't need to be five paragraphs. I remember my favorite professor, Michael T Williamson, showing us, like this book of like rules and encouraging us to break them, or, like encouraging us to question them. And thinking like, Oh, this is, this is the hijinks, actually, like Russell Crowe in a beautiful mind throwing the calculus book out the window. Yeah, personally,
Unknown Speaker
I think this class will be a waste of your and what is infinitely worse, my time. However, here we are, so you may attend or not. You may complete your assignments at your whim. We have the gun,
Dr. Melinda Lewis
you know, we have this phrase teaching and learning, and we unfortunately think of college too often as teaching, that students go to lecture and receive instruction from professors. Of course, what you learn in college is important, especially you know you want your civil engineers to know about sound bridge design, et cetera. But aside from that, I'd argue to your point, it's much more about ownership that you come to own the material. You have confidence in your ability to learn, and you have confidence and exposure to these ideas as well. So you know how to explore you've overcome this barrier of, I don't know it, but here's the material and I'm interested in I know how to extract and get what I need from it and move forward. I think that's just such aempowerment, like even the magic of seeing fractals in the wild, like being able to put prints and electrical engineering in conversation with each other immediately that we got one connection there that makes dancing more fun. With
Dr. Steven Weber
these false dichotomies, we partition up the intellectual pie into these little slices and say, Well, certainly this has nothing with that one. Of course, it is all interconnected. It sounds cheesy to say it that way, but you know, that's one of the things I've really enjoyed about honors classes, honestly, as an instructor here, is there's that openness and flexibility in the college, in the Pannonian Honors College, to teach classes that bring together true interdisciplinary so I've, like, taught with faculty from the law school. Oh, yeah. So technology meets the law happens a lot cyber security, privacy, right? And students, I think, really enjoyed seeing different faculty with different backgrounds bringing different perspectives on a common topic. So something we should try and
Dr. Melinda Lewis
do more? Yeah, what would you put in conversation with electrical engineering and technology? I mean, law is one example, but what would be like another.
Dr. Steven Weber
It's collabs. So much of it, I think, is this phrase electrical engineering, or computer engineering, has has these connotations. And some of them may be earned. Some of them, I think, are unfortunate and historical. We live in a technological age, right? It's always strikes people who are not engineers, I think, as something esoteric, something difficult, something abstruse, not particularly relevant to ordinary life, and really doesn't
Speaker 1
strike fun. If I say I'm an electrical engineer, I don't think the first thought that comes to people is, this is a good time. But don't
Speaker 2
you think that a lot of that has to do with our society's unfortunate or at least too frequent association of math as hard and uninteresting 1,000%
Dr. Steven Weber
I also think that there's an issue with just treating educational process as something severe and like monastic and like it is about work, work, work, and not really thinking about the pleasure involved in the work. It's the joy of discovery. It's a way of approaching questions, using some tools, using some frameworks, but trying to figure things out. And there's a joy in figuring things out. And the thing is that what's maybe very positive about this time and age is I do think we're in this really incredible era in which students have unprecedented access, not just students, all of us, to really inspired presentations on interesting math online. So there's so many good YouTube channels out there presenting math and. I think, is much more along the lines how it should be presented, as curiosity based inquiry, and nothing to do with memorizing or formulas or sticking in numbers. It's much more about what patterns Are we recognizing, what symmetries are there? And that's really at the root of a lot of math inquiry, as I understand.
Speaker 4
Ready go, 510, 1520, 2530 3540 4045 5055, 6065, 7075, 8085, stop. 8517 fingers. Look at that bar with 17 fingers sticking up. How do you do that? Kid? Anyway, five times. I think a
Dr. Steven Weber
lot of has to do with presentations we talk about. Like, what makes a good instructor? Certainly an infectious enthusiasm for the topic matters a great deal. Like, if I don't care, why should you care Exactly? But beyond that, I don't think that's I think that's necessary, but not sufficient. In addition, I have to you have to know who your audience is. You have to know what's going to resonate with them. So it's one of the jobs we have as instructors to kind of think, How can I connect this thing, which I believe to be important with my audience? I
Dr. Melinda Lewis
think the other part of the equation is not just being excited about the topic or what you're teaching, but also being excited about the puzzle of teaching, oh, yeah, because it is a hard endeavor, and I don't think people recognize how hard it is
Dr. Steven Weber
because of the broadcast problem, by which I mean 20 some people in your class, maybe a lot more than that, maybe hundreds. And ideally, what happens is you and I figure out our shared connection. Yeah, what resonates with you? How I can bring what resonates with you into the material? And it's inherently individualistic, so it's hard to do at scale. When I the last time I taught gradual probability to electrical engineering students, I did something I had never done before, despite many years of teaching it, which was to have a term paper, a term paper in probability. Like, what's that about? But? But it was, take this material and make it your own and apply it to a context. So people did, you know, sports betting, some people did stock market. Some people did family genealogy. Like, the applications are incredibly wide, and I can't cover all of them, but that was a mechanism that allowed the students to kind of make the material their own. Yeah, it's a performance, right? Yeah, I don't mean to trivialize it's not just a performance. It's serious business, but the performance aspect of it is important. There's got
Dr. Melinda Lewis
to be a little razzle dazzle. Yes, you got to be aware of the audience. You got to be aware of the levels when the jokes are killing or like when the audience is snoozing out.
Speaker 6
Pam, went from a 53 to an 82 was that the highest? Well, almost. I mean, that guy who spent six weeks in the bathroom got a 91 but look, there's more going on here than test scores and grades. You all worked hard and you improved. That's very nice. Mr. Shupe. The point is, we are here to discuss Mr. Shupe, flagrant violation of school policy. Holy Ghost, the average scores here increased from 28 to 63 now that's 125% improvement. Now that's teaching, Mr. Shoup, I'm grabbing your tenure.
Dr. Steven Weber
I remember I was teaching a very small class of undergrad probability. And I had, I don't know, eight or 10 students. You know, 10 years ago is a different time than today, but I was frustrated by students being on their phones while I was lecturing. Said, All right, well, I'm gonna put an end to that. When you come in the classroom, you have to put your phone on the desk and you can get it at the end. All right, this is gonna solve all my problems, right? I'm gonna have, I've nailed it. Draft attention from all of these, you know, eager young minds with burning yearning for learning,
Dr. Melinda Lewis
who are gonna discover that their phones are awful, right? And they'll never wanna pick them up again, yeah?
Dr. Steven Weber
And of course, what happened, this is what, you know, humbled me, was the amount of doodling went way up. Oh, yeah. So I mean, yeah, it is a show. Like, there's a performance, there's an engagement component. And I don't claim to know how to do that particularly well. I just know that's important part of that connection
Dr. Melinda Lewis
and the humility. Like, I also think letting go of the ego and saying, like, I'm not gonna get every person in this room,
Dr. Steven Weber
but usually what I feel for myself is I just need one person tracking me, because it's been in this experience. But I have been in this experience teaching classes that people don't love to take, like probability, where it appears to me, and I don't always know, but it appears to me that everyone is checked out, and it's disconcerting, like it throws me off my game. Not only is it a performance, the audience feedback very much affects how I handle the getting bad vibes. It's so hard to and if everyone is there, you know, closed eyes, or on the laptop or anything, it's it throws me off my game. If I just have one person who I feel is like tracking because I walk across the room, all right, I'm just teaching that person. That's great. So I do think you're right, that it does take a recognition I'm good at what I do. I could be better, and I'm gonna try and improve. And that's not a criticism of anything. It's just that makes us human right, that we always have more opportunities to get better because
Speaker 6
I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it. It's. People like me, this has been today's daily affirmation with Stuart small.
Dr. Stephen Weber
I'm just glad that Dr so I think has really invested in a meaningful way in putting together thoughtful opportunities for faculty to improve. And I've certainly benefited from those. Yeah,
Dr. Melinda Lewis
I think there's also a great amount of faculty who are interested and willing to do a bunch of different things. So like, I know that in honors, we've had like zine projects, and I know that West fall has really cool projects that there are people across campus who are trying to play around with, like what these end products can be, or what the learning process looks like, or how we can build more experiential learning opportunities in the classroom in ways that feel organic and meaningful and intentional, which is exciting to see.
Dr. Steven Weber
It's an experiment, like you'll try some things and some things won't work, and other things will, and you just kind of continuously improve. But it's if you don't have the attitude of, I want to get better. I want to make my classroom better than then it won't stay close.
Unknown Speaker
These upsies will always stay close to z and never trend away. That
Speaker 5
point is in the middle, right set band the right set. You're a shock test on viter David
Unknown Speaker
pterodactyl. You're a heart shaped box.
Unknown Speaker
Hey, it's
Unknown Speaker
your mom. I
Unknown Speaker
have a question about that podcast you do?
Speaker 8
Are you on the Instagram or the Twitter or the Facebook? You know, like, I
Dr. Melinda Lewis
have an idea for a podcast. How do I get in touch with you? Love you. Bye. Sup, mom, yeah. So you can find us on all those things, actually, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, just go to pop quest pod on any one of those and follow if you want to send us ideas, you can either go over to our website and leave us a message at pop Q podcast, or you can get us directly at pop q@drexel.edu, you can actually find us on iTunes. Spotify, Stitcher. I can help set it up when I get home, but then you have to promise me to rate an interview. All right. Love you. Bye.
Dr. Steven Weber
It's curious to me, from engineering that careers like medicine in particular, but also law, are glorified in Hollywood, while science and engineering and math vilified, but they're mocked. Yeah, you know, like the stereotypes are negative know your theory, Alexander, but
Unknown Speaker
the boys found a simple geometrical picture. A tree structure won't work. No, he's joining the two vertices, but I can do the sum. What is how you group the terms? Alexander Jerry, if we do the whole thing this way, then, hey, look, look,I wrote it down.
Dr. Steven Weber
It's simpler this way. In other cultures, like India, like an engineer, oh, that's like, it has a cachet that is not at all present in the United States. But law has always struck me as a strange thing to I kind of get medicine like, Yeah, you were sick and now you're better, but my sister's lawyers. I don't mean a disrespect to attorneys, but it's just not as self evident as the thing that should be like, brought to me, made sexy and interesting on TV.
Unknown Speaker
Well, it's so funny you say that because I've been watching La law.
Unknown Speaker
I was watching Ally McBeal. Oh
Unknown Speaker
yeah. David E Kelly, yeah, come on,
Speaker 8
maybe we should do another episode, just trying to show that everybody does a little pretending. Some women even lie and still think they're blameless in life. Some even cheat. Objection. Move to strike.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Let's just keep going. Yeah. It's so interesting, because I think what that show does really well is show how flawed they are, like a sense of righteousness, a sense of ego, and also, like we're doing this for money, like they're never kind of getting away from the ickiness of what they're being asked to do, yeah, which is very different than the kind of moral crusaders that John Grisham, which I think really helped promote that sense of like the firm, yeah, this paperwork is the most meaningful paperwork that will ever exist. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
that's a very interesting contrast. Yeah,
Dr. Steven Weber
are you elevating or recognizing that they're existing in this kind of unglamorous, amoral almost mindset. Okay, I'll leave you alone with your Blackboard.
Unknown Speaker
Don't play games with me. Don't do it. Amy.
Unknown Speaker
It's never glamorous. Oh no.
Speaker 2
It's always you are sad, cerebral, detached. Just unrelatable and sad.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Yeah, it's just you and your math problem, which is
Dr. Steven Weber
just a disservice, of course, but they're always kind of overcome.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Nobody's dancing at the prince club, right? Recognizing fractals, right? That's a movie moment. I
Unknown Speaker
guess if anyone here can solve that problem, I'd see to it that none of you ever have to open another math book again for the rest of your lives. Do you
Dr. Melinda Lewis
want to talk about Skeletor and how Skeletor enters into this conversation? Yes, yes. So
Dr. Steven Weber
of course, I brought my what would Skeletor do, which I always carry with me wherever I go. That's
Dr. Melinda Lewis
the final anchoring point for students.
Unknown Speaker
Skeletor. How did you get in
Unknown Speaker
the same way we are going to get out?
Dr. Steven Weber
Part of it is, I worry that a lot of people don't know who Skeletor is. Good. Concern, problematic, right? But you know, Skeletor is the leader of the adversaries of he man and his friends in the Masters of the Universe cartoon world,
Speaker 5
dringer became the mighty battle. Cat and I became he man, the most powerful man in the universe. Only three others share this secret, our friends, the sorceress and Orca, together, we defend Castle Grayskull from the evil forces of Skeletor.
Dr. Steven Weber
Why I feel like Skeletor was right to write a book. What would Skeletor do more so than than Adam or he man should have written the book is because Skeletor has had to prevail over much greater adversity, I'd say, I mean, Adam and he man have these wonderful support structures with Tila and Man at Arms and Orco, right? Like they're a great team. They're collegial, they're helpful, they have same goals. And who's on skeletors team? Evil Lynn, yeah, Beast Man, I mean, just for those two names, you don't know who they are, but if someone that's evil at their name like they're not gonna be like the team imagining team goals with Yeah, evil Lynn and Beast Man, I'm
Dr. Melinda Lewis
not gonna put a lot of trust right into either of those people.
Speaker 9
But why can't I join your game, because you are a whip scientist and you could be a whip villain. Why do I surround myself with fools? Even the robots are smarter than you.
Dr. Steven Weber
So in terms of like difficulty in management, like Skeletor has it much, much harder job than he man would. So, yeah, so his book is all about that, like, how do you take these kind of difficult situations, and what has he done? So that's why it's a great management book, yeah, and has great pictures in it too.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
He man and Adam is a prince, yep. The authority is imbued, for whatever reason, it imbued into that role. So people just trust. But if you don't have that authority imbued by whatever external force or birth, you have to demonstrate the trust like you have to cultivate it, it doesn't come with you. You have to be like, Listen, I'm Skeletor. I understand the concerns that we have. I will work hard to make our dream into a reality. And on
Dr. Steven Weber
top of that, which is a huge thing, talk about tenacity. Every single episode, he man wins, and skeletors, plan is foiled, yeah, and what does he do? Comes back with a new plan. New Plan every single week, like that's admirable. That's that stick with itness that really helps you get
Dr. Melinda Lewis
through. But in thinking of it, Skeletor cannot do this work alone. You always need people to, like, rely upon, and they may not be the best folks, but they all have skills to bring to the table. I, like the Beast Man, can bring a lot of muscle.
Speaker 9
You Furry flee. Bit will fall. I'll cover my throne with your hide. That's
Dr. Steven Weber
very good point. Like, part of being a leader is knowing how to recognize the unique contributions of each individual's gifts overall whole. And that's sometimes a little bit harder or more challenging with someone like a beast man or an eagle Lynn, yeah, than it would be in other cases. So great, great manager, just
Unknown Speaker
morally, he has some problems, of course, remember,
Speaker 9
you are special and unique, just like everyone else, until we meet again.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
When you wake up in the morning, what do you take from Skeletor? Change
Dr. Steven Weber
happens slowly. You know, I'm in the Provost Office and, and there's so much that we are working on addressing, and I get to work with inspiring and talented and wonderful colleagues on this. There's so much we're trying to fix, and but it moves slowly, so it's kind of like every day, all right, yes, put in. The work in the long run, we will get there, but you need to have that tenacity to stick with it, yeah, so I think I got that from Skeletor.
Unknown Speaker
There's Socrates, there's Skeletor. Yeah,
Dr. Steven Weber
that works. I love it. We could propose as an immediate follow up of the Shakespeare reading group to have the skeleton, yeah. What did Skeletor mean by Yeah,
Dr. Melinda Lewis
when Angelo says this, I It reminds me of Skeletor, and Skeletor says, Yeah, all
Unknown Speaker
right, that'll be our shared secret agenda.
Unknown Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Steven. Oh, thank
Dr. Steven Weber
you. This has been so fun. What an honor to be asked to participate in this prestigious forum. And the conversation was great. I appreciate
Dr. Melinda Lewis
the chance to talk. I think it's always really nice when you find people who care about teaching and learning in the same ways that you do. What's
Dr. Steven Weber
been great about coming to Pennoni is there's that real sense of shared mission.
Dr. Melinda Lewis
Pop, the Question was researched and hosted by Dr Melinda Lewis. Our theme music and episodes are produced by Brian Kantorek. All of this was done under the directorship of Erica Levi Zelinger, the deanship of Dr. Neville Vakharia, and the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.
Speaker 7
Are we talking about practice? Man, what are we talking about? Practice? About practice? We talking about practice. Man, we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We talking about the game. We're talking about practice.