I once saw an internet report that the vice president of Rice University, a famous private university in the United States, announced the abolition of its mathematics major, and only retained three teachers who taught basic mathematics courses to professional courses. This news caused me to understand and think about the teaching significance of the two basic courses of College Mathematics and physics.

As we all know, since the founding of new China, the functions and settings of basic courses (Mathematics and physics in this paper) in undergraduate teaching in China can be roughly divided into two stages: the early days of the people's Republic of China - the beginning of reform and opening up - to now. In the previous stage, China's higher education basically copied the education system of the former Soviet Union, split up some related disciplines of the comprehensive universities in the period of the Republic of China, and established the most professional specialized universities in the world. These industrial universities are represented by the "eight capital colleges" (aviation, medicine, geology, iron and steel, mining, petroleum, forestry, agricultural machinery, all of which are key universities determined by the state in 1960) located on Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, and the "combination of standard universities" set up in various provinces since then (mostly around 1958): universities, colleges of technology, medical schools, normal colleges, universities of science and technology Agricultural college. At the end of this stage, some schools set up the mathematics and physics teaching and research section as the basic curriculum department, which is managed as a secondary unit in the school. Some universities put the physics teaching and research section in the relevant professional departments. For example, when we were in school, Beijing Institute of geology put the physics teaching and research section in the geophysical exploration department. Because geophysical exploration technology is based on physics, mechanics and mathematics, and belongs to an important branch and growing point of Applied Physics in modern times. The teachers of mathematics and physics in our school during this period are from Shandong University, Sun Yat sen University, Sichuan University and Chongqing University.

In the teaching of basic courses in our university, we mainly teach the basic knowledge in strict accordance with the contents of the unified teaching materials, which seems to be the consensus of the requirements of basic courses in most university teaching arrangements at this stage. In most ordinary universities, the lecturers of basic courses generally do not do scientific research.

In the second stage, for some key universities with postgraduate qualification in mathematics and physics, the teaching and research departments of mathematics and physics will be jointly established as a college of mathematics and physics, or an independent college will be established. There are two kinds of teachers: one is responsible for public curriculum teaching, and the other is responsible for guiding graduate students. Obviously, these teachers need to guide graduate students through different degrees of scientific research experience and achievements.

In the decades of teaching and research work in our university, I have experienced the elegant demeanor of many teachers of basic courses in our university. Their teaching characteristics are not only teaching course knowledge. Most of these teachers were born in famous schools in China, and the academic elements of these basic course teachers have helped me grow up for a long time. My college physics teacher, Mr. Jiang Zhi, in class, in addition to clearly and accurately talking about the basic knowledge and basic concepts of physics courses, he often stressed that we should "think more" and not mechanically accept the knowledge of teaching materials. Our class's "a red heart, colorful life - Beijing Institute of Geosciences class 61652 graduation 50th anniversary album" records: "50 years of responsibility and responsibility, thanks to the school thirteen (our class boys dormitory) corridor, sounded teacher Jiang Zhi's famous saying: think more! Think about it. It opened the window of our soul, and got a strong response from Liu Qingsheng, Dai Lianshan and other students. Let class 61652 have greater wisdom and courage to devote themselves to social and scientific practice. ". Professor Zhang Guoxiong and I have cooperated in scientific research on the direction of "cross study of ferromagnetism and rock magnetism", and published two academic papers in Journal of Wuhan University (NATURAL SCIENCE EDITION) (his first work, my second work) (1988) and mineralogy and Petrology (my first work, his second work) (1992). At the beginning of my stay in school, when I investigated the research direction of Geophysics, I consulted Professor Shi Guoliang, the teacher of physical field theory. He suggested me to choose the direction of "electromagnetic method", and told me that there were still some basic scientific problems worthy of study in the direction of "electromagnetic method", while there were few scientific problems worthy of study in the direction of stable gravity and magnetic field. This is the main reason why I chose to engage in "rock magnetism research direction" for a long time. Because at that time, I had been assigned to teach in the teaching and research section of magnetic exploration, and it seemed inappropriate to engage in "research direction of electromagnetic method". Time and practice have proved that my choice is undoubtedly correct.

In many articles, I have introduced my contacts with several teachers of basic courses in the University and their far-reaching influence on my future scientific research. In addition to the above teachers, there are also mathematics teachers, Professor LAN Zhongxiong (who came from Tsinghua University and is said to have a close relationship with Mr. Hua Luogeng, who is the first director of the school's mathematics teaching and Research Office) and Professor Li Jincai“ Teacher LAN has a Fujian accent, and the scholar style embodied in teaching has been deeply imprinted in my mind. Miss LAN has no lecture notes in class, but she is proficient in content, clear in thinking, outstanding in key points, and never follows the book. His wonderful classroom teaching style has planted in my heart the seeds of "being an excellent teacher" and "Teacher Li consciously adheres to the spirit of scientific research under the difficult conditions of family life, which makes me admire and moved. At that time, without the support of scientific research funds, he was just "asking for trouble" to do his favorite scientific research. I learned the pleasure of doing scientific research from Mr. Li, which is one of the typical "cases" for me to talk about the spirit of scientific research with my younger generation. Mr. Yuan Jinchen, a mathematics professor (graduated from Shandong University and a disciple of Mr. Pan Chengtong), once proposed to cooperate with me in scientific research, and carefully read the "magnetic exploration course" co edited by four colleges and universities, which was used in the course of "magnetic exploration" taught by me to geophysical Exploration Major at that time, At the same time, whether the "functional analysis" can be applied to geophysical exploration methods is proposed. We had a long talk for many times, but in the end, because of my weak mathematical foundation, we didn't produce substantial cooperative research results. I said in an article, "although the old professor (referring to Yuan Jinchen) used to study Russian, he taught himself English in order to read the original works of English mathematics. Now he can basically understand the English literature he is interested in. I admire his tenacious learning spirit. I think that if one has the scientific spirit of an old professor, he can create "any miracle in the world".

In my opinion, one of the main reasons for the high quality of basic courses teaching in some famous universities in China is that these teachers usually do scientific research. Although they have different degrees and achievements, they often inadvertently integrate the thinking mode of scientific research into the teaching process of basic courses, so as to greatly improve the teaching quality of basic courses. There is a consensus in European and American universities. It is said that MIT has no fixed establishment for some basic courses, and the teachers employed for basic courses generally have good academic background, and decide whether to renew their employment according to their teaching effect. Therefore, I think that as a teacher of basic courses, no matter whether he undertakes the task of guiding postgraduates or not, moderate scientific research experience will improve his teaching effect of basic courses. Moreover, many young university teachers of basic courses have generally experienced a complete graduate education, and some have also experienced the process of postdoctoral research, with a good academic background, which provides a solid foundation for them to implement innovative teaching methods in curriculum teaching. In my opinion, teachers with good academic background and sense of responsibility, if they combine the core concepts in basic courses with the majors of teaching objects (such as potential field in geophysics, elastic mechanics in seismology, mathematical equations and related transformations in mathematics, etc.), will certainly improve the teaching effect of "boring" basic courses, Let our basic course teaching "live", which is very helpful for students to understand the relevant concepts of basic courses, and is of great significance for the construction of high-level universities.