Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–22
Caltech, although very quickly they promoted me to assistant professor. I was teaching and
enjoyed it. I taught in graduate school. I had an assistantship my first year. That was OK. Then
I had an NSF grant—you could get paid extra if you taught, and I taught using the Houston
method. I’m going to have to take a slight digression here—William Houston was president of
Rice at that time. But before that, he’d been chairman of the physics division at Caltech and had
invented a way of teaching, which was that the kids went to the board five hours a week, and you
were graded on how well you did at the board.
ASPATURIAN: Meaning what, exactly?
TOMBRELLO: Meaning you did whatever problem you were sort of assigned at random.
Basically, you learned that you had better try to work every problem in the book, because you
never knew what was going to happen. People like Bob [Robert B.] Leighton [Valentine
Professor of Physics, emeritus, d. 1997] had been a product of that approach in an earlier
generation at Caltech. You learned to think on your feet. You also learned strategy—say,
somebody’s at the board and can’t work the problem, and you know there’s a problem coming
along that you might not want to get. You jump up and volunteer to finish the problem of the
guy at the board. So you learn gamesmanship in addition to learning how to work the problems.
I not only took it at Rice; I taught it at Rice, when I was in my last years as a grad student, which
was great preparation for my PhD oral. Because those things tended to be shootouts at Rice.
ASPATURIAN: It taught you to be very fast on your feet, I would think.
TOMBRELLO: Sneaky as much as smart, but yes. You worked what you could and tried to
present it as though it were the whole problem. So I’m at Yale and I’m teaching, which I did not
mind. The students there were not as good as the ones at Caltech, but they were not bad. I
mean, Yale was a great place. But I realized I was not happy. So I began to negotiate with Willy
[William A.] Fowler [Institute Professor of Physics, emeritus, d. 1995] about coming back as a
postdoc.
ASPATURIAN: So you were willing to give up an assistant professorship—
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T