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Re: A Parents' Day gem



Is it not likely that behind the agrieved parent's outburst lies a history
of perhaps healthy intellectual exchanges with the child? The parent may
have been deprived of an education in physics and thus may be unfamiliar
with a "fact" that is really terribly oversimplified as stated? Of course
we physicists all know what the teacher *meant* when he said that a bullet
fired horizontally falls as fast as one dropped from the same height. We
also know that the statement is likely *incorrect* in the real world
because we have neglected important effects, and we are under obligation
to make that very clear when introducing it to students.

In this case it is likely that I would side with the parent. The very fact
that the child shared something from the physics class with the parent is,
to me, a very positive indication. The child was evidently sufficiently
excited by the new concept to take it home. Knowing that such excitations
do occur in the real world is heartening. The child took home a flawed
product, however, and the parent reacted inappropriately, but I find the
teachers reaction (confrontation and subsequent ridicule in relating the
incident to colleagues) to be even less appropriate.

After writing the above I got Nick Guilbert's further protest:

Let's remember the context, ok? This is from a *conceptual
physics* course in a *high school*, a course in which we do not treat,
when discussing projectile motion,
-> air resistance (including spin effects)
-> the curvature of the earth
-> the coriolis effect
-> the variation of 'g' with altitude
-> the uncertainties in position or momentum of either bullet
or any of the other subtleties my learned colleagues on the list
(correctly) point out. It's just constant downward acceleration with a
projectile launched horizontally, in vacuum (it is assumed), on a locally
flat earth (it is assumed). Remember also that the parent's (father's,
actually) objections centered around the assertion that
....

I think this is the strongest argument I've seen for getting rid of the
misnamed courses in "conceptual physics". One must question their value
to the student and to the society. Originally I believe these courses
were promoted on the premise that they would produce "scientific
literacy" in a population otherwise deprived of that blessing. Here we
have a conceptual physics course with a menu of *important* concepts
which are intentionally left out. Not only are these topics not treated
mathematically, they are not mentioned at a natural juncture in the
course dealing with projectile motion.

Nick's omission here is not a unique error. It is entirely representative
of the point of view taken by proponents of such courses. I can talk about
*all* of the topics in the list on a level appropriate to a mathematically
unsophisticated student. Why is it inappropriate to talk about them when
they naturally come up?

Leigh