{"id":373,"date":"2006-07-06T11:28:15","date_gmt":"2006-07-06T11:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/06\/stop-thinking-in-terms-of-high\/"},"modified":"2006-07-06T11:28:15","modified_gmt":"2006-07-06T11:28:15","slug":"stop-thinking-in-terms-of-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/06\/stop-thinking-in-terms-of-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Thinking in Terms of High School Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

For the past 6 years I’ve taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100’s years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic; there is little time for fun. And if we want to make room for something like that we usually have to squeeze out some other topic. Whoosh! <\/p>\n

It gets worse. At the UW we are lucky enough to have a large contingent of students from excellent high schools. This means they have seen almost all of the material previously! Snore!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Amen, brother. I’ve come to the same conclusion, particularly regarding the students with good high-school physics backgrounds. Our introductory mechanics class is particularly rough on them, because the first six weeks or so look exactly<\/strong> like high-school physics, and students who have seen the material before start to tune out– they stop doing the homework, they stop taking notes, they stop coming to class. And then, when we hit them with some material that’s new to them (Special Relativity and vector angular momentum), they’ve developed all these bad habits, and just get crushed. And they get stomped on even worse in E & M the next term, which starts off with new-to-them material.<\/p>\n

(More after the cut.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I try to do what I can to keep them working, through a homework policy that is byzantine in its complexity, and by giving a whole bunch of short quizzes to make them focus on the class work, but it only helps a little. And the most frustrating thing about the whole deal is that it selectively affects the best students– the ones who have the preparation to be able to handle something more interesting, if we could hold their attention.<\/p>\n

As a department, we’ve tried to deal with this by splitting most of those students off into an Honors section of the intro classes, where they get some extra material. And, like Gordon, we’re starting to experiment with a radically different curriculum for the intro classes. Gordon talks about using the Six Ideas That Shaped Physics<\/cite><\/a> series, while this past year, our chairman used the Matter and Interactions<\/cite><\/a> course. They’re very different approaches– Six Ideas<\/cite> starts with conservation laws, and organizes the class around core principles of physics, while Matter and Interactions<\/cite> makes heavy use of computer simulations to tackle more realistic problems than the standard curriculum allows– but they have one important common factor: they look nothing at all like high school physics.<\/p>\n

I haven’t taught under either of these curricula, though I have cribbed a good deal of material from the Six Ideas<\/cite> books for various classes. I’d certainly be willing to give either of them a shot. There are some concerns, though, about how they work for students who don’t have a good background in physics already, particularly with Matter and Interactions<\/cite>, which adds the complicating factor of computers (given the number of students I see who are freaked out by Excel, VPython may be a bit much to ask). It’s a Hard Problem, in the end.<\/p>\n

(The post title, by the way, is a joke that only a very small number of people will get– it’s something that was said by a visiting seminar speaker at NIST, in response to a question from Bill Phillips, who won a Nobel Prize six months later…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics. For the past 6 years I’ve taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100’s years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic;… Continue reading Stop Thinking in Terms of High School Physics<\/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":[13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","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=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}