Re: ??? ??? ???

["Cooper, John N" <jcooper@bucknell.edu>]

On Fri, 5 Sep 1997, LUDWIK KOWALSKI wrote:

> Yes, "thinking's fun", as you wrote, Leigh, and as confirmed by Margaret
> on the other side of the globe. I wish my students would agree. 
   Perhaps a non-physicist's perspective will enlighten.
 1. Most of your students are not physicists, have no hope of, or interest
in, becoming so.  It is a truism that those who teach a subject are
disproportionately under-represented in their clientele, at least up to
the junior in college.  Communication consists in addressing audience, not
whom you wish it were. 
 2. I heard a wonderful tale last night of a local highschool senior, a
notorious goof-/off who managed to get admission to Bucknell after a
summer of classes in which he astonished the multitudes by scoring a 4.0
and his mother by locking himself in his room all day doing problems.  He
told his mother he could do the homework in 15 minutes and the rest of the
time was spent trying to figure out where the implications of extensions
of his inferences led.  He is now as a freshman in physics tutoring other
students in it.  He told his mother he has at last found what he wants to
do for the rest of his life.  It does happen! 
 3. His transformation took place during his senior year in high school, 
when he took physics from a new fledgling instructor.  My daughter is 
starting senior physics from the same cat this year.  We'll see.
 4. My experience, watching my daughter come up through the system, is 
that kids are taught to value/learn answers, not come up with questions.  
I have experimented in my classes with having groups of them pool their 
thoughts on how they would ask the question of nature in a ways that 
nature can respond .. how to formulate their questions in experimentally 
answerable ways.  They find that quite a new way of thinking but in the 
anonymity of group response .. I ask them to formulate a group response, 
sign off on it and turn it in .. adapt relatively quickly.

  John Cooper, Chemistry, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA 17837-2005
	    jcooper@bucknell.edu          VOX 00 1 717-524-3673
                          FAX 00 1 717 524 1739