I’m giving the last lecture of new material in my intro E&M class today, on Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetic waves. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck again by the way our trimester system (three ten-week terms, instead of two 15-week semesters) is a lousy match for the standard curricula. Or even new curricula, like the Matter and Interactions course we’ve started using this year.<\/p>\n
In this case, it’s not a matter of needing to rush to fit things in, though. It’s a matter of peaking at the wrong time<\/p>\n
M&I is different than the standard textbooks in a lot of respects, but like most books, it’s organized in such a way that people at a semester school can cover about one chapter per week. It’s also arranged so that the hardest material is not at the very end, but rather about three-quarters of the way through. Gauss’s Law, Ampere’s Law, and Faraday’s Law, the three parts of the intro E&M class that are most confusing for new students, fall in the ninth and tenth chapters (out of 13). The last few chapters cover basic wave phenomena, and a really quick intro to the photon concept, material that isn’t nearly as intimidating. The class sort of tapers off, in a way that works to preserve everybody’s sanity.<\/p>\n
The problem is, we’ve only got ten weeks to work with. which means we’re hitting the students with the very hardest material in the ninth and tenth week of classes. This is right when everybody’s nerves are most frayed, and students are scrambling to complete final projects and papers for other classes. And, on top of everything else, the weather has gotten nice (well, not today, but in general).<\/p>\n
Getting the class to focus is really<\/strong> difficult right at the moment. Hell, getting the faculty to focus is pretty tough right now. And this is when we’re doing the hardest material in the entire course… The results aren’t pretty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m giving the last lecture of new material in my intro E&M class today, on Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetic waves. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck again by the way our trimester system (three ten-week terms, instead of two 15-week semesters) is a lousy match for the standard curricula. Or even new… Continue reading Calendrical Mismatch<\/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-2672","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\/2672","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=2672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}