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Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

My youngest has Allen Downey as a professor this year. She says he is crazy. And she means this in the best way possible. His productivity is prolific having written Think Java in 13 days. He memorized pictures and bios of all 90 students in the first year class at Olin College of Engineering.

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Allen's classes were always some of the most over-enrolled ever since I can remember at Olin =).

My favorite Allen memory was a modeling contest between him and Mark Somerville. (Physical modeling, of course.) The result was basically a draw, but their approaches were totally different: Allen's was beautifully simple as usual, Mark's brilliantly complex.

For anyone interested in Allen's style: http://greenteapress.com/wp/physical-modeling-in-matlab/

> He memorized pictures and bios of all 90 students in the first year class at Olin College of Engineering.

Do you know if he was using spaced repetition to do that? I know some teachers have tried that to speed up learning their students.

I would assume so. I can't imagine how you could accomplish that otherwise without having a photographic memory.

Teachers learn their students eventually, by constant regular exposure (which you could consider to be de facto exploiting the spacing effect), so it doesn't require a herculean memory. Spaced repetition software is just a neat trick to speed the process up.

I don't know. But he is so deep and broad in his knowledge that he may have a memory that exceeds mere mortal memory. This is a book he is working on now http://greenteapress.com/thinkos/index.html

From the description:

> This book is intended for a different audience, and it has different goals. I developed it for a class at Olin College called Software Systems.

> Most students taking this class learned to program in Python, so one of the goals is to help them learn C. For that part of the class, I use Griffiths and Griffiths, Head First C, from O'Reilly Media. This book is meant to complement that one.

> Few of my students will ever write an operating system, but many of them will write low-level applications in C, and some of them will work on embedded systems. My class includes material from operating systems, networks, databases, and embedded systems, but it emphasizes the topics programmers need to know.

>He memorized pictures and bios of all 90 students in the first year class at Olin College of Engineering.

It's impressive not so much that he did that, but that he bothered to try.

Most lecturers (myself included) will try very hard not to learn anything about their students because they consider actually dealing with undergrads (particularly first-years!) on an individual level is beneath them.

Sad to know that attitude pervades higher ed. Another reason students are well served choosing a teaching college for undergraduate instead of a research university.

At Olin everyone is an undergraduate. Olin is about reinventing engineering education. They consider faculty as very important to the process but they are guides not instructors. The students most of the time have to seek information and approaches out.

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