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Re: Physics enrollments



Pang-Chieh,
all of you suggestions are good ways to spice things up. The
problem we have run into here is getting professors to try new things. I
don't know if they are stuck in their ways or they don't want to put in
the extra time to restructure they way they teach.
Does anyone have any suggestions for getting professors to change
the way they do things? How do we package it for them so that it is
appealing for them to change? All the professors we have that are
resistant to change have tenure, so they don't care about poor
evaluations. How do we kill this appethy? These are usually the same
professors who can CRUCIFY a great demo by over analyzing it. It ends up
being the students viewing an in class lab experiment.
It seems that the profs who want to change things have to work
themselves into the ground to prove that there is a better way of
teaching. The others just drift along doing the same old thing and then
scratch their head when we can't get new Physics majors, or we loose them.
I sometimes wonder what world they are living in because the results are
obvious!
I think the time has come to treat it like a grape vine. Produce
GOOD grapes or you get pruned. I don't care how old you are and I don't
care what kind of grapes you used to produce. All I care about is what
kind of grapes you are producing now. If you give me poor grapes, you
will only produce poor wine.

--
James Bradford Shue jshue@comp.uark.edu
University of Arkansas Voice phone:(501) 575-6059
Physics Lab/Demo Curator FAX Number: (501) 575-4580
WWW Page http://comp.uark.edu/~jshue