Be A Teacher, But Ground Your Topics in Reality

One of the major problems when teaching any topic is the lack of context in how and where something is used.

I had to smile this week when Marty Hellman — one of the greatest computer scientists of all time — said that he didn’t like the Linear Algebra course he received at university when studying Electrical Engineering because it was taught from a pure maths point-of-view. But, he found, it was actually the most useful course he took for his cryptography research. Many of us will look back on our own careers about the modules we studied or the training courses that we went on, which we just hated but found to be so useful. A good teacher will let you know that the thing you are studying is so relevant at the time they teach you, rather than finding out for yourself.

Marty says:

“I wanted to take more physics than the average electrical engineer and so I went into this experimental programme called engineering science and they made me take more math. So they made me take linear algebra in my final year I thought this is the most useless theoretical abstract Math course I’d ever taken but only because it was taught in a math department and where they didn’t want to connect it to reality. Then when I got to graduate school was the most useful course I’d ever taken”

The moral of the story .. as a teacher, always apply the context of your work into real-life things and use examples which relate to things that students can relate to. It’s a shame that at school maths teachers perhaps still teach logarithms in the same old way, and turn their pupils off the topic. But, at the heart of the security of the Internet is the discrete log problem. The whole subject of logarithms could be brough alive with a single great example. In fact, every single connection to the Web is based on the discrete log probem.

When we teach some basics of discrete logarithms, we often see a gap in knowledge, even though every student has done logarithms in the past. It’s as if some knowledge went in, then was maked as not useful, and stored away in your memory in a long-term garbage area. That’s a shame as discrete logarithms are wonderful:

Y=g^x (mod p)

… just beautiful. Well, here’s Marty’s talk:

Go get your kids into maths and physics, and for us not to fail another generation.