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Re: Perils of getting the "right answer education"



I notice you are now in the Philosophy Department....I wonder why.

\On
Tue, 13 May 1997, Richard E. Grandy wrote:

Many decades ago in a college mechanics lab my partner and I did the basic
experiment of shooting a ball from a catapult and measuring the distance it
traversed at various angles of the catapult. Having had calculus and read
the text, we were surprised that our maximum was pretty far off the 45
degrees it "should" have been. Air resistance didn't seem enough.

Eventually we realized that the text problem has the ball launched and
landing at the same elevation appropriate calculation and our result was
within the margin of error. We explained all this in the lab report, and
got a D because we got the "wrong answer". The TA wouldn't listen and the
instructor wanted nothing to do with us. I learned as much about physics
education as about mechanics in that course.

Richard Grandy
Department of Philosophy
Rice University