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At this time of the year electricity is upon us. I am posting a quotation
from the draft of an article (sent to The Science Teacher by Ellis Noll)
about the way of teaching Coulomb's law. How do you deal with the dilemma
described in the third paragraph?
Ludwik Kowalski
.........................................................................
.... The sequence on electricity begins with electrostatics. We establish
the existence of two kinds of charge...
How can we introduce
the coulomb unit without violating the rule of ideal teaching? The rule calls
for logical continuity; it does not allow us to explain something today in
terms of what is going to be explained tomorrow. In practice the rule is often
violated but this is not desirable. What should we do?