![]() ![]() New York City’s public resources again served Dresselhaus well when it came time to select a high school. She also snuck into the Hayden Planetarium repeatedly, committing their shows and collections to memory. It wasn’t only the free museums that caught her attention. Dresselhaus would later credit these museums with sparking her interest in science. The American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others allowed free admission and a keen teenager could scurry among them on the subway for a nickel a ride. She was captivated by New York’s museums. From the time she was able, she contributed to household finances by doing piecework assembly tasks at home and working in a zipper factory over the summer.īut what the Spiewak family lacked in private means the young Millie, as she was known, more than made up for with public resources. ![]() The Great Depression weighed heavily on the Polish–Jewish immigrant family in which Dresselhaus grew up. It was November 11, 1930, just over a year after the Black Tuesday stock market crash. The front page of the New York Times announced “1.7% Decline in Jobs Spurs Relief Groups to Rush Aid for Idle” on the day Mildred Spiewak was born in Brooklyn. Appreciating their influence on her later pedagogy requires understanding something of her origins. But her teaching career had deeper roots. Credit: American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archivesĭresselhaus began teaching university physics in 1967 when she transitioned to the MIT electrical engineering department from the Lincoln Laboratory, a defense research installation loosely affiliated with the Institute. Dresselhaus with her portrait at American Institute of Physics. Together, they help us think about why we teach physics the way we do.įigure 1. The outward path explores how this one course fit within the pedagogical practices of physics in postwar America, revealing some of the strategies committed teachers could employ to combat the dog-eat-dog environment that prevailed as the population of physics students boomed after World War II. The inward path probes the personal experiences that informed Dresselhaus’s pedagogy, revealing how they shaped the convictions of a successful and much-lauded teacher. These sources present two paths for exploration. The second is a set of notes from the 1972 iteration of Dresselhaus’s solid-state theory course at MIT. The first is a series of oral history interviews documenting her childhood, education, and career, and recording her convictions about teaching. Here, I focus on a less noted (though no less noteworthy) aspect of her legacy: her influence as a pedagogue.ĭresselhaus’s characteristic approach to pedagogy is evident in two sources. She was the first woman to be honored with the title of Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she pioneered leadership roles for women in many of the professional societies and organizations to which she belonged. Dresselhaus also earned renown for her advocacy on behalf of women in science. Her groundwork ensured that when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated and characterized graphene, they were a shoo-in for the 2010 Nobel Prize. When these exotic carbon compounds arrived on the scene, she was positioned to become a world-leading expert on them, coauthoring the standard textbook. The “Queen of Carbon” pioneered the physical study of the sixth element well before the keen attention attracted by fullerenes and nanotubes. When Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus (figure 1) passed away in February 2017, she left behind an indelible legacy. The published version of this paper is available at. Mildred Dresselhaus and Solid State Pedagogy at MIT
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