My College Physics Professor

In a comment on someone else’s blog, I (very) recently mentioned my physics professor from college. I say that in the singular form because it was a small college and the Physics department was tiny. Including the department head, I believe there were three instructors in the entire department. I’m honestly not even sure if they even had a secretary while I attended.

Before I started attending, I had already decided that one of my (three!!! yipe) majors would be Physics. Originally, I had been planning on only getting the credits required for a minor in it, but the “numbers” just worked out that it was only about two more courses (in an already-overloaded schedule – but who needs sleep?) to fulfill a major, so, yep — that’s what I was doing, all right!

After having one particular professor for Physics 101, I was even sure I’d made the right decision and eventually even changed what I listed as my “Primary” major to Physics from Computer Science. [If you ever hear about someone who received a degree for a “double” or “triple” major (at the same time), the way this works is you only get one of them listed on your diploma, but the others go on your transcript as “Also completed the requirements for …”.]

I was determined, after studying under this professor, I wanted to take as many courses as I could which he was teaching and I wanted to say that I had graduated as a Physics major.

Thank you, Dr. Andre Mirabelli, wherever you might be now and whatever you might be doing.

And I’m Saying This Because…?

As I’ve mentioned somewhere else on this site, a couple of years ago, I compiled a collection of stories and such about my grandparents, the extended family I know of, my parents, and myself. To the best of my knowledge, for many of these stories, there wasn’t necessarily anyone else who knew them, and I wanted to preserve them — especially for my two sons, who might not have heard or remembered them.

That task wound up spanning about a decade (due to extensive pauses and such), but, eventually, I declared it finished and worked towards generating physical copies (complete with commissioned cover art, even). These are private only and not something I ever planned to, nor ever will, share with the world in general.

However, in the (too large?) chapter of the book with my own personal stories, I have, of course, a section regarding college and within that section I have several “stories” (reminiscences? anecdotes?) regarding Dr. Mirabelli. What I learned from him, not just the “Physics stuff”, but also his approach to teaching, have been invaluable and have stood me in good stead throughout my life — and not just in situations where i was attempting to instruct others.

With that said, I would like to include, here, those stories — honoring Dr. Mirabelli and those four years in college. They are included verbatim (including a repetitious first section).

Dr. Mirabelli’s Approach

As I noted (above), a very large part of why I liked Physics so much was because, with only a couple of courses, I kept having the same professor for almost all of the Physics courses that I took — Dr. Andre Mirabelli.

Dr. Mirabelli was, at least in my opinion, an awesome teacher. First off — at the beginning of every course, he would hand out (as every professor did) a syllabus covering what would be happening in the course — quizzes, homework, exams, etc. Part of this would be a list of how many points were associated with each of those items. In addition, he would indicate how many points were needed for a 4.0.

For example, it might be for one course that there would be 350 points associated with all of the work that we would be doing for the whole semester. And, given that, if we ended the semester with, say, 280 points, that would result in receiving a 4.0.

and Numbers …

Another thing that was interesting was that, in just about every course, Dr. Mirabelli would never use numbers. Every time we worked our way through something, it would always be to solve for the equation.

As he explained, at least for the first couple of courses, if you try solving with the numbers, you’ve, at best, solved one problem. If the numbers change, though, you’d need to recalculate it and do it all over again. However, by solving the equation, it would be a simple matter of plugging in numbers to the already-solved equation to calculate the (numeric) answer.

I think there were, maybe, two times, in all of the courses that I took with him, when he actually substituted numbers into an already-solved equation and, in those cases, it was specifically to show how well certain things worked out and how various parts of … the universe all just fit together.

and Tests

First off, just about all of the tests (and quizzes) that Dr. Mirabelli would give were “open-book” and “open-notebook.” It was, really, only in the very early classes (entry-level Physics) where he didn’t do that. In that case, though, he would hand out a “cheat-sheet” with all of the basic formulas, etc., on it. That way, everyone just needed to figure out how to approach the questions to transform them into something that could be done with the provided formulas.

In the later classes, where it was full open-book and open-notebook — it was much more focused on working out which set of formulas were appropriate to use with this problem, and how to approach solving it.

Also, every time we had a quiz or a test, after handing it out and everyone started working on it, Dr. Mirabelli would sit down at the front of the classroom — and start to work on it himself. Yes, that’s correct — he would take his own test at the same time.

This had a couple of interesting outcomes to it: 1) He would, at times, realize he’d forgotten to include a necessary data point in one of the problems, so he would stand up and write something on the blackboard to let us all know; 2) if you finished before he did, you’d clearly forgotten something or, worse, screwed up horribly.

Finally, one of the really nice things, and this was true for quizzes, tests, and homework, was that Dr. Mirabelli would go through all of the work you did for each problem. If you’d started solving the problem the correct way but then, in the process of working through the solution, you dropped a sign or something — switching a minus to a plus or something similar — he would give you most of the credit for the problem.

Final Note

One of the things which always amused me was how I would hear from many other students, taking him during Physics 101 or shortly thereafter, how much they absolutely hated his classes and would vow to never do so again. Apparently, they were all-too-reliant on simply being able to plug numbers into a calculator without actually understanding anything of what they were doing.

In some (many?) ways, I think, ultimately, that was what I learned while studying in his courses: I always have done my best to make sure I understand whatever it is I’m working on. Simply doing it by rote isn’t enough.