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Re: Reality



Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 23:20:52 -0500
Reply-to: phys-l@mailer.uwf.edu
From: Jerome Epstein <jerepst@worldnet.att.net>
To: phys-l@atlantis.uwf.edu
Subject: Re: Reality

As a newcomer to this Board, forgive my bluntness.

Most of what I see shows again that most of our
colleagues, including most with a serious concern for good
science education, really have little knowledge of how
deep this problem goes.

As some extensive diagnostic testing I have done in recent
years clearly shows, there are at your (any) institution a
great many students who lost all comprehension of
mathematics and basic quantitative reasoning in the fourth
grade; there are probably many more than you think, and I
can prove it. Trying to deal with this issue through
"remedial algebra" or "science literacy" will not make a
dent in this problem, as has been shown over and over
again. Until a serious approach to the REAL problem is
mounted, there will not be any serious improvement, at
least for the lower half to two-thirds of our students.

Before I came on this Board, Richard Hake kindly referred
to some of my recent work. Readers should feel free to
inquire for further information on the diagnostic testing
and/or for information on a comprehensive program to
attempt to deal with reality (or see JCST, December 1997).

J. Epstein
Gang:
I am sorry that I gave some participants in the list the
impression that I don't think that the poor showing of
American students on math and science tests is important.
I do! I only meant to indicate that we need to go to work
in our local school divisions to make things better. We
also need to recognize that students are different. In
l950--OK, I'm giving it away--when I was in high school--I
don't believe instruction in the sciences was any better,
BUT many of the students had spent time working with an old
car (mechanical and electrical training) or working on a
HI-FI (circuits and electronics). Now everything is on a
microchip and nobody has to look at wires. Modern
electronics, particularly the digital kind, is not very
helpful because it has gotten separated from the physical
science. You put a 3-volt pulse in here and an amplified
pulse comes out here is not very much related to physics.
If we are going to develop a feeling for how a physical
system behaves; how the principles of physics determine its
behavior; and how to model it mathematically, we will need
to do a lot of basic work which is not easy. WBN
Barlow Newbolt
Department of Physics and Engineering
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450
Telephone and Phone Mail: 540-463-8881
Fax: 540-463-8884
e-mail: NewboltW@madison.acad.wlu.edu

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

Neils Bohr