Continental Classroom
Continental Classroom is a U.S. educational television program that was broadcast on the NBC network five days a week in the early morning from 1958 to 1963, covering physics, chemistry, mathematics, and American government.Each lecture was recorded in a four-hour studio session some two weeks ahead of the air date,[6] usually in the afternoon by instructor preference.[7] The program attracted more viewers and a wider variety of viewers than NBC had expected:[8] 400,000 for the physics course, 600,000 for chemistry, and one and a half million for American government, and including high-school classes[9] (two of them for blind students), more than 800 engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area, nuns, 500 inmates of San Quentin State Prison in California, parents of students studying science, and other members of the public, including many 6–14-year-olds.[13] White, described by Time as looking "like an insomniac alchemist" on the program,[13][17] had seven Nobel Prize winners appear as guest lecturers,[2][4][13] one of them being Carl D.[20] The physics course was repeated during the preceding half hour,[3] and chemists and physicists began watching each other's programs in addition.[21] The Contemporary Mathematics course that began in fall 1960 was divided in two ways: each week, the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes were for college students and the Tuesday and Thursday classes for teachers;[22] and in addition, the first half of the course was Modern Algebra, taught by John Kelley of Berkeley and Julius J. Hlavaty of DeWitt Clinton High School, New York, respectively, and the second Probability and Statistics, taught by Frederick Mosteller, chairman of the department of statistics at Harvard University, and Paul Clifford of Montclair State College.[35] In 1992, David S. Moore looked back on it as "quite remarkable", a precursor of programs for highly motivated learners like the National Technological University.