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Re: "quantization" [now constructivism]



Leigh Palmer wrote:

[deletions]
I have always taken this as a religious statement - by Dewey. He
advocates a view of teaching he calls "constructivism", something
akin to postmodernist science studies, I think. Science studies
extremists believe that all physical law is constructed by human
thought (e.g. conservation of charge is a human mental construct)
and I have imagined that Dewey means to suggest that Einstein
held this opinion. It is unclear to me who said this, and in what
language it was said. Is this a statement from Einstein? Did it,
perhaps, occur in the context of a paragraph?

Einstein was not into solipsism.


I have a very different take on "constructivism" than the above. As I
understand it the basic point of constructivism is that each student
must build his (=his/her) own system of physics based on what he knows
when he begins. In other words, students are not blank slates to be
written on, but must actively learn anything we want to teach them.
Sometimes this learning involves unlearning things they thought they
knew. In this sense, constructivism explains a lot of what I see going
on in classrooms and especially on exams. Students make mistakes that
are more than just forgetting the answer, and memorizing what I tell
them does not completely accomplish what I want them to learn. An
integration process is necessary even after I convince them of the
reasonableness of what I am saying. "Physics must be understood," and I
understand that to mean that physics must be fit into a web of prior
knowledge in a consistent way.

Now whether constructivist activites accomplish that learning or not is
a different issue. In my experience, some do, some don't. Moreover,
given that each person's teaching must be consistent with his/her own
skills and personality, maybe some of the activities that don't work for
me will work for others.

--
Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu
http://www.physics.udel.edu/~barnhill/
Physics Dept., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716