{"id":9921,"date":"2015-02-19T08:22:32","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T13:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9921"},"modified":"2015-02-19T08:22:32","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T13:22:32","slug":"real-world-physics-and-objectively-pro-injustice-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/02\/19\/real-world-physics-and-objectively-pro-injustice-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Real-World Physics and Objectively Pro-Injustice “News”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Quantum Progress there was a recent series of guest posts about a social-justice-in-physics curriculum<\/a> used by high school teacher Moses Rifkin<\/a>. I sort of glanced at it, said “Huh, that’s sort of interesting,” and moved on, but this got picked up by some right-wing sites, and exploded. To the point where the awful people on Fox’s awful morning show did a segment<\/a> hating on it.<\/p>\n

The angle of attack is, of course, that this is wasting time that ought to be spent on teaching physics. And, you know, I applaud Fox News’s sudden concern for the teaching of physics– if they’d like to have me on to explain quantum mechanics to their audience, with or without Emmy, I’d be happy to do that. Call me, guys.<\/p>\n

But really, this is a stupid complaint. If you were talking about a college class, then maybe– I’m not likely to adopt this because in a good term, I might see a particular group of students 30 times (40 if it’s a class where I also do the labs). Spending six classes on social justice would be 20% of my curriculum, and I can’t afford that– I don’t get to spend six classes on conservation of energy. But in a high school class that meets something like 150 times over the course of a school year, that’s just 4% of the class. I would bet money that most high-school classes fritter away more than 4% of their time on stuff that’s vastly less useful.<\/p>\n

And if you actually read what Rifkin wrote, rather than simply flipping out after reading the phrase “social justice,” this isn’t a wasted set of hippie-dippy classes where folks just share feelings. He’s got them doing Internet research, reading and analyzing articles, and parsing statistics. You know, doing science<\/em>. Which is the real point of science classes, or ought to be.<\/p>\n

Most important, of course, is that this is teaching students about how the world really works<\/em>, and how science is done in the real world. Which isn’t just shiny happy fun times playing with lasers; maybe it kind of sucks to have to learn that, but, you know, life is tough. Get a helmet.<\/p>\n

So, you know, good for Moses Rifkin, and good for his students. And the counter on the big “Hours since last stupid and awful segment” sign at Fox gets flipped back to zero.<\/p>\n

(What would be awesome is for one of the MSNBC shows to have Rifkin on to talk about his work. If I had the power to affect their booking, though, I would be a regular guest. So I’ll settle for giving him what positive promotion I can here…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Quantum Progress there was a recent series of guest posts about a social-justice-in-physics curriculum used by high school teacher Moses Rifkin. I sort of glanced at it, said “Huh, that’s sort of interesting,” and moved on, but this got picked up by some right-wing sites, and exploded. To the point where the awful… Continue reading Real-World Physics and Objectively Pro-Injustice “News”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,28,37,11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-politics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9921","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=9921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}