Raymond A. Rogoway wrote:
..I'm not unique in stressing a structured problem solving approach and
the anecdotal feedback that I get from my students is that this one of
the major things that they use in their college physics classes.
I too am a high school and junior college physics teacher and have
copious anecdotal evidence about how my high school class provided them
with the background to make their college classes "a breeze", so I would
disagree with the statement that it makes "no difference".
I also would like to comment on the California requirements. In my
personal experience, the physics that I teach most would require little
beyond the physics I and II courses and to require that prospective
teachers major in physics looks good on paper, but is not a vital
requirement to do the job in most instances and in some cases would put
into the classroom a person with such an intuitive understanding of the
subject that they may forget what is hard about learning phsysics in the
first place. This is what I feel has been the greatest boon to building
my program at Olathe North H.S. where I started with one section of 18
students and have grown to 9 sections with over 210 students (52% of
which have been female for the last 3years). This didn't come from my
having a working knowledge of how to apply QED to particle interactions,
but from remembering how seemingly insurmountable it was to comrehend
vectors and being able to help my students find their way through it