Here, I want to focus on a particular lesson from Broken Genius, a biography of William Shockley — semiconductor pioneer, Nobel laureate, inventor of the transistor and, late in life, a staunch and highly controversial supporter of eugenics. His decision to pursue eugenics, having no training in genetics whatsoever, perhaps explains the title of the book.

In one retelling, the employees of Shockley Semiconductor, on the verge of what would become a civilization-changing mutiny*, complained that they had not been allowed or empowered to publish their own papers in the peer-review journals that cover physics and electronics.

Shockley, acknowledging this, went right home, wrote up some ideas about semiconductor physics, and handed those ideas to his team to flesh out and publish.

Shockley was known as a brilliant man in the field of semiconductor physics. However, he was terrible as a manager and — in the corporate environment, at least as indicated by this anecdote — an awful teacher.

For me, this highlights the difference between "teaching" and "learning". I'm sure that anyone who worked with Shockley learned from one of the best in the electronics field. But did he actually teach? Further, was any transfer of knowledge that did take place maximized? Most importantly, were the Shockley employees given the framework to come up with their own ideas and answers to important problems?

It's dangerous to define "teaching" as "that thing that makes learning take place". If that were the case, "teaching" then actually comes from the barrel of a gun in some countries.

And, with that, the second half of my vacation — a half that is miles away from broadband connections and mobile reception — begins.

* "Civilization-changing mutiny" is no hyperbole. Eight of the mutineers from Shockley Semiconductor — reportedly dubbed the "Traitorous Eight" in some retellings — moved down the road to start Fairchild Camera And Instrument Company's semiconductor group. Later, after helping to invent the standard by which microelectronics are manufactured today, two men in their early thirties left Fairchild to found a little company called... Intel.