{"id":2540,"date":"2008-04-28T10:38:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T10:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/28\/matter-and-interactions-by-cha\/"},"modified":"2008-04-28T10:38:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T10:38:00","slug":"matter-and-interactions-by-cha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/28\/matter-and-interactions-by-cha\/","title":{"rendered":"Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s episode of “Thrilling Tales of Physics Pedagogy” is brought to you through a comment by CCPhysicst<\/a> who picks up on the implications of last week’s schedule post:<\/p>\n

\n

You are ripping right along in that course. You do E and then B and only later get around to circuits?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes and no. We are ripping right along, because our insane trimester calendar demands it. We’re not ripping along quite as rapidly as this might make it seem, though, because we’re using a new curriculum based on Matter and Interactions<\/cite> by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood<\/a>. It approaches topics in a somewhat idiosyncratic order.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Volume II, covering the traditional E&M areas, starts off with electric fields (Coulomb’s Law was covered in Volume I) and electric dipoles, then talks a bit about charging and polarization of materials, then distributions of charge. After dealing with solid objects, it moves on to electric potential, then to magnetic fields and Biot-Savart, before returning to electric circuits for a couple of chapters, and then moving on to magnetic forces on particles.<\/p>\n

That’s not all that much like the standard order of things, but it does mostly work. There’s some internal logic to the order of topics, and it does have the nice effect of putting most of the scaaaary integrals close together (distributions of charge, electric potential, and Biot-Savart all involve integration, so doing them in successive chapters keeps students on top of the techniques).<\/p>\n

Of course, the fact that there is some<\/strong> internal logic doesn’t mean that it all makes sense. In particular, the jump from Biot-Savart back to electric circuits just feels weird, and then they split the circuit topics up over two chapters in a way that feels kind of strained to me. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to them, but it feels really artificial and arbitrary to me.<\/p>\n

This is a problem I encounter all the time with textbooks, though. I have a similar problem in the standard classical mechanics course, where most books spend an entire chapter on work and the “work-kinetic energy theorem” before introducing potential energy and conservation of energy. That’s never made much sense, either, and has always felt more like a result of an imposed need to break the material up into chapters that each take one week to cover, rather than a natural break point in the material. It takes about a week and a half to cover all of work and energy, so they’ve padded the “work” section out a bit, and made it a chapter in its own right.<\/p>\n

After hemming and hawing quite a bit, I decided to punt on the circuit stuff, in more or less the same way I do regarding work and energy in mechanics. I’m spending this week and part of next jumping back and forth between Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 in the book, in order to cover the circuit topics in a way that I’m comfortable with, rather than forcing myself to follow the book exactly, and giving lousy lectures as a result.<\/p>\n

I rationalize this by saying that it provides students with a different take on the same material, so they’re not in the classic bind of having identical explanations in the textbook and in their lecture notes, with no way to shed light on the subject if it doesn’t “click” from that one explanation. (The classic “Don’t take a class from a professor who wrote the book” problem.) This is a blatant rationalization, though.<\/p>\n

I generally like the book, for what it’s worth. It consistently takes a microscopic view of the physics under discussion, which is a refreshing change in perspective. More importantly, the language and approach are very different than the standard intro treatment, so we’re not lulling students from AP Physics to sleep with familiar-looking material, but challenging them to actually think about what’s going on.<\/p>\n

The different approach does make occasional trouble for the faculty, though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s episode of “Thrilling Tales of Physics Pedagogy” is brought to you through a comment by CCPhysicst who picks up on the implications of last week’s schedule post: You are ripping right along in that course. You do E and then B and only later get around to circuits? Yes and no. We are ripping… Continue reading Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}