TeachingProf. strips, stabs stuffed animal to teach quantum mechanics
Students who showed up for Monday’s quantum physics class of Professor Emlyn Hughes, a Columbia University physics professor, found out they were in for a new approach to teaching the week’s topic.
As the students entered the classroom, they were greeted with the tune of Lil Wayne’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” As the students were taking their seats, Hughes removed his clothes, then changed into a black T-shirt and pants. He then sat down and hugged his knees in a fetal position before airing video footage of the 9/11 2001 terror attacks, and videos of aerial bombardments from the Second World War.
Students who showed up for Monday’s quantum physics class of Professor Emlyn Hughes, a Columbia University physics professor, found out they were in for a new approach to teaching the week’s topic.
As the students entered the classroom, they were greeted with the tune of Lil Wayne’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” As the students were taking their seats, Hughes removed his clothes, then changed into a black T-shirt and pants.
The Columbia Spectator reports that Hughes then sat down and hugged his knees in a fetal position before airing video footage of the 9/11 2001 terror attacks, and videos of aerial bombardments from the Second World War.
As the videos ended, two figures clad in black and carrying long swords jumped onto the stage, with one of them chopping a stuffed animal in half.
Reyna Pacheco Rios told Fox News that the “extremely shocking” stunt was surprising and confusing to the class. “I do think that the professor’s stunt was surprising and to an extent confusing, but it was completely outside the box, it related to the material he was speaking about as he started the lecture saying that we ‘had to strip from everything we knew and think about Quantum Physics, we have to think about Quantum Physics completely different,’” Rios said. “He said ‘everything we had learned before this lecture wouldn’t help us, we had to strip any knowledge that we thought would be useful because it would only make it hard for us to understand Quantum Physics.’”
Rios said the performance was “gutsy” and represented a “whole different aspect” of teaching.
“I do wish he had explained his stunt a little more, but it was definitely an experience, a different learning experience that was bizarre nonetheless; but it was his way of teaching,” Rios’ said in an e-mail to Fix News.
Maura Barry-Garland told the Columbia Spectator that she found Hughes’s act to be troubling.
“It was very disturbing, and I don’t think anyone in the audience got what he was doing,” she said. “He didn’t explain it or provide a context, and that’s why it was offensive to me and to other people.”
Following these introductory performances, Hughes proceeded to teach the rest of the lecture on quantum physics as if nothing had happened, although he put on his sunglasses and a hood for the remainder of class.
Hughes, a dedicated runner and a married father of five, have engaged in classroom antics before. The Spectator reports that in fall 2011 he displayed for the class nude photos of attendees at Woodstock.
