“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
– Albert Einstein

” There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
–John von Neumann

You have two of the greatest minds of the 20th century basically stating the same thing here in my opinion – keep it simple. You have a very complex set of ideas that these men were working on at the same time in history:  Einstein on the physics of the atomic bomb and von Neumann on the electrical engineering of something that did not even yet truly exist – a computer that could compute the complex mathematical problems needed to calculate the design of the bomb and the destruction that the atomic bomb would produce.

You experience the same difficulties as the student next to you does in this class or another class; the pure and unstated fact that the professor is unable to keep the subject matter simple enough to comprehend. Oh, it may not be the professor’s fault – they were taught in the same manner and don’t know the difference;  they are “tired” of all the snotty nosed “know it all” students, they may want to separate the “wheat from the chaff”, or they just aren’t capable of doing what they may feel is “dumbing down” the subject matter. Whatever the reason, it is my strong opinion that this may be the reason that we as a nation are so far behind on the so-called STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects/careers.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying here; I am not advocating that the subjects be “spoon-fed” to the students or we get into a situation where the teachers/professors teach the tests. My concern here is that maybe we should be concerned that we have a generation of teachers & professors that suffered through these very hard subject matters and may be unable to properly teach them in a “simple” way to where the students can understand and not be afraid of the subject — afraid of taking the subject because tradition has said that you cannot pass these subjects unless you are an “nerd” or a “genus”. These subjects are hard enough to grasp by their very nature, the teacher/professor doesn’t need to also be unable to explain the subject as well. As Albert would no doubt have the right to say to some professors ” If you can’t explain it simply to your students, you don’t understand it well enough to teach it.”