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My
Teacher: Jozsef Oveges
By Tamas
Isoldos
Physicist,
science book writer, TV personality, Professor Oveges was a
wonderful teacher of science with a charming and humorous personality.
His enthusiasm for education, his ability to inspire learning
and his effective teaching methods have made a lasting impression
on many people. How did Oveges encourage his students to learn?
What can we learn from him? After reading the text you will
know the answers.
I was
seven years old when I first saw Jozsef Oveges. Our primary
school class in Marcali, Hungary, knew that the slight man
was a famous physics professor from ,
so we were surprised when he took a balloon from his pocket
and blew it up. The usually noisy class watched silently.
"Here it goes!" the professor exclaimed as
he let go of the balloon, which soared with a screech over
our heads. "So, what do you think of that?" he asked. "The
air flowing backward pushes the balloon forward. And now you
understand how they launch rockets."
Then he asked, "What do you like to do, children,
when you don't have to study?"
"Listen to the radio," I said.
"What is your favorite program?"
"The one that explains how the radio
works,"
I answered.
"Now that's something!" he exclaimed with
surprise. "Can you repeat what you heard?"
"Sound is changed into for broadcasting," I said confidently. "The
signals sent from the broadcast tower are picked up by the
receiver at home and changed back into sound." It was not
that common, then or now, to find girls keen about science.
My correct answer interested the professor.
"Well,
Bea," he said, "visit men the next time you are in Budapest, and I will show
you one or two interesting things."
I felt very excited when
my parents brought me to the professor's flat six months later.
I was ushered into a book-lined study. While he arranged
things on his desk, I sat on chair and fidgeted with anticipation.
Finally the professor asked me to approach. When I got
up, I cried sharply as I felt the sting of an electric spark.
He laughed at my surprise and urged me to sit back down, then
get up and touch the chair. Sure enough, another big
spark was produced.
"You rubbed the seat of
the chair with a piece of cloth, so it gained a ,"
the professor explained. "But since your feet were touching
the floor, you conducted the electric charge in an unbroken
flow. When you stood up, you left the chair charged.
When you touched its metal leg, it produced sparks as the
charged jumped from it, and your hands conducted them into
the ground."
On a table was the
professor's "laboratory equipment": a sour-cream cup, odd pieces of glass
and Ping-pong balls. "Now we'll do something new," he
announced. "We'll draw with a common nail."
I watched skeptically as
he wrapped a tin can with a piece of drawing paper dampened
with a special liquid, then linked the can to the of a battery. He attached a nail to the negative
pole, then handed it tome and said, ", draw
something."
I was amazed as the rusty
nail left a string of blood-red letters on the damp paper.
"When the nail came into contact with the liquid, a
chemical reaction resulted," the professor explained. "This caused the color
change."
I felt thrilled and proud.
I now understood a serious scientific phenomenon.
From that moment, this wonderful
teacher and scientist—who again and again proved that the
most complicated theories could be demonstrated with ordinary
objects—became my model. His enthusiasm inspired many
students to explore the basic knowledge of science.
The
Oveges's method of teaching
made science and mathematics fun instead of a chore.
Today, inspired by this great man, I teach my students the
secrets of nature at a technical high school.
Over several decades Professor
Oveges's charm, dialect and sense of humor made him a favorite
IB personality for millions of Hungarians. His joyous
exclamation as he completed an experiment—"Isn't it
amazing!"—.
One of my favorite memories of the professor
happened a few years after I first met him. One day my dad
yelled from the next room, "Professor Oveges is on TV. Come,
quick."
The professor was standing beside a little
paper dog
with a tiny wooden dog inside the door. "Heki!" "Heki!" he
shouted, and the dog jumped out of the kennel. How did he
do that? I wondered. The professor showed the simple circuit
inside the kennel, whose
was attached to its wall. He put his hand against the wall,
and when he shouted at a certain ,
the paper wall vibrated.
I watched with my mouth open as he explained
the phenomenon: When the paper wall vibrated, the electrical
circuit was interrupted, and an electromagnet released the
spring that forced Heki out of his kennel. I was so fascinated
that the next day I bought the professor's book, Let's
Experiment and Think! and decided to become a physicist.
Jozsef Oveges was born on November 10, 1895,
in Hungary. Coming from a family of educators, he showed an
early liking for teaching. After his father's death, the family
moved to the city of Gyor, where the young Oveges went to
school.
At age 16, he chose to study mathematics and
physics. He had spent his childhood in the natural environment
of the countryside, constantly questioning the whys of natural
phenomena, so he was attracted to objective, demonstrable truths.
Later, he taught in the secondary schools.
He measured the success of his classes partly by the amount
of laughter he was able to elicit. Typical was the way he
once began a mathematics class: "Children, you are going to
shout with pleasure because, by the end of the class, you
will know how to
compound numbers in just seconds."
He was, however, no .
He demanded regular study, and he continuously challenged
his students. They never knew when he would take out the matchbox
in which he kept numbered pieces of paper corresponding to
the pupils' seat numbers. The student whose number came up
would face an oral exam.
"All right, time for a quiz. Who will it be
today?" In silence they watched as he picked up the "lucky"
winner. Then the questions came very quickly: What colors
are in a rainbow? How do they form? Can you walk under them?
Can you produce the colors yourself? How?
After the 10-15 minute "game," the student
sank down in his seat, exhausted.
Because there were no scientific books Professor
Oveges regarded suitable for his students, he wrote his own.
His first was Weather Forecasting and Analysis. A publishing
company offered to publish the book—on the condition that
the author gather 2000 advance orders. When the object was
to draw attention, Professor Oveges was never at a loss. He
published an advertisement with the following text: "Sell
your umbrella, and buy Oveges's weather-forecasting book!"
It didn't take long to sign up the necessary subscribers.
The book was published and quickly sold out.
The professor soon wrote more books. One day
the principal of the school wandered into his class. As usual,
the class was like a stage play, with the participation of
all the students. In the closing scene, Oveges asked, "Who
wants a chance to get an ‘A' by taking an oral quiz?"
All raised hands. The principal shook his
head in disbelief and commented, "I never knew there were
teachers like him."
Impressed by Oveges's ability to inspire learning,
the principal heartily recommended him to a publishing company.
The professor was startled that a Budapest textbook publisher
was coming to him. His classic textbook Little Physics
was the result, becoming a standard text.
Oveges's new methods—using different
to add emphasis, including drawings to illustrate experiments
and writing analytically—contributed to the unusual popularity
of his books. The Physics of Modern Age was published
45 years ago, and is still around today.
After the war, when most school labs were
damaged or destroyed, there was a great need for the
professor's
.
"Send me to the smallest village in the country, where there's
only grass where the school lab once was," he wrote in a 1949
Council of Public Education publication. "With ordinary household
, I can demonstrate anything."
Using the simplest tools, Professor Oveges
performed convincing experiments. This was his guiding principle
when, in 1948, he began his highly popular radio programs,
and when, ten years later, he launched his hugely successful
television series, "My Favorite Experiments."Though
he was often shy in social settings, science brought out the
showman in him.
Once Professor Oveges invited someone from
a well-equipped research institute to his TV show to see who
could measure more precisely the speed of sound. The researcher
brought a digital timer, which started automatically as the
sound reached the .
The professor brought a tube made of three empty tin cans,
a tape measure and a jar filled with water. Shouting into
the tube, he moved it up and down in the water until the sound
was the most resonant, indicating that the wavelength of his
voice corresponded with the resonant wavelength of the column
of air in the tube. Next he measured the length of the tube
sticking out of the water, and from this calculated the speed
of sound.
His answer came closer to the value given
in reference books than the number the institution's instrument
showed.
The television show made Professor Oveges
famous throughout Hungary. One afternoon, as he was sitting
beside a lake enjoying the sun, a sheep dog came toward him,
stopped at a respectful distance and began to bark. Its owner,
a ,
walked up, tipped his hat and said to the dog, "Yes, it's
him all right."
"But how do you know me?" the professor asked.
"From television," the shepherd said. Then,
hanging his head toward the dog, he added, "We watch your
show together."
The professor's sense of humor helped sustain
him even in difficult situations. Once, in a store in Budapest,
he asked the clerk to wrap his sausage double so as not to
make the manuscripts dirty in his briefcase. The clerk ignored
his request. Dissatisfied, he asked for the "complaints
register"—the
official suggestion box in Hungary. A nervous chill settled
over the shop as the frightened store manager handed over
the register to the disgruntled customer.
All eyes were on the professor as he seriously
opened the book, tore out a couple of blank pages, wrapped
his sausage in them and politely wished everyone a good day.
Professor Oveges spent the summers of his
retirement in his birthplace. There, at his home, he was demonstrating
to friends the experiment of light when he suddenly collapsed
on his desk. He suffered a brain and died three days later, on September 4, 1979.
The professor's enthusiasm and energy continue
to bear fruit today. George Olah, for example, was a dull
student of physics when, as a 16-year-old, he first took a
class with Oveges. It would change his outlook forever. "If
anybody made me enthusiastic about science, it was him," says
Olah. Recalling Oveges's practice of using tin cans and sour
cream containers to perform his experiments, Olah adds, "We
didn't have much to work with in those days, but using household
objects—things we knew—made us feel comfortable."
Olah went on to get a Ph.D. from the University
of Budapest and become associate director of the Central Chemical
Research Institute at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences before
moving to the United States. There he eventually was named
director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the
University of Southern California. It was for his research
in chemistry that Olah's crowning achievement came in 1994,
when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Professor Oveges's picture still hangs in
my room. But more than just his photo stays with me. In my
job as a teacher, I feel his presence. In the enthusiasm of
my pupils, I see his spell-binding personality and faith in
the beauty of knowledge and nature. And I can almost hear
his delighted exclamation, "Isn't it amazing!"
(1,993 words)
(From Reader's Digest,June 1996)
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