Re: College nowadays - What "should" students know?

[Hugh Haskell <haskell@ODIE.NCSSM.EDU>]

And in the best of all possible worlds, wouldn't it be lovely if all
students could be expected to leave high school with approximately
the same level of understanding of physics, having been taught the
subject much like math is taught in our pre-college
environment--start at the fourth or fifth grade with material that is
appropriate to the fourth or fifth grade, and every year after that,
add to that material, and give the students some experience with
suitable lab activities and experience at working with their hands,
so that when they get to physics in high school, they can be taught
material that is appropriate for high school, rather than for middle
school as it now is, because we have to reteach much of what was done
wrong earlier. Then college courses could start assuming that the
students knew certain aspects of physics and could get into the more
interesting and challenging stuff early on. As it is now, the middle
schools do something with physics, some students get it done mostly
again in 9th grade physical science, and since not everyone has had
anywhere the same experience, we need to start over again when we get
them in 11th or 12th grade. And to compound the insanity, since not
everyone has had the same experience in high school, our college
courses start all over again from the beginning. What a waste of time
and energy! If we taught math like that the nation would be up in
arms (I don't mean to imply that math teaching has no room for
improvement, just that the premise they start from is much more
rational than what we use in physics, and other sciences as well).

Of course there will probably always have to be a two-track physics
program that may start as early as high school--one for those who
will not grow up to become physical scientists or engineers (this
should not be "physics for poets"--I refuse to accept the necessity
of such courses until English departments start offering courses in
"Poetry for Physicists.") and one for those who will. But neither
should have to start at the beginning and there should be room for
crossover as the students refine their goals for the future.

This also doesn't mean that some subject will be visited more than
once. Most of them should be seen several times, for I believe that
true understanding only comes after familiarity has been achieved.
But they should be able to be covered at different levels each time
they are revisited. This is the way understanding is achieved. I
believe that our present efforts to achieve understanding on the
first pass are futile (at least for the vast majority of students).
We are chasing a chimera. My understanding of elementary physics
ideas is growing every day, and I have been doing physics, off and
on, for over 40 years. How can we expect students to get the type of
understanding we want them to have in a year or less?

What will this take? My guess is national standards are essentially
worthless, because school districts can ignore them as they see fit
(of course, they may pay a price for that, but many will be willing
to do it--look at Kansas and the creationism controversy). What we
need is a national curriculum that is enforced at the federal level.
Only this way will we be able to start physics in college at a
college level, and not have the professors spending the first
semester or so doing remedial high school physics.

Will this ever happen? Not bloody likely. It flies in the face of two
hundred years of the tradition of local control of the schools. So
schools now are free to do any stupid thing they want with the
curriculum, and you don't have to look very hard to see them doing
just that.

When we look at our math/science preparation in high schools compared
to that of other countries, we see differences between us and those
countries that lie well beyond what we can fix in the schools--We are
a large and diverse country with strong local governments that are
jealous of their prerogatives. Most of the countries of Europe and
elsewhere that we are compared with are smaller, much more
homogeneous, and have strong central governments that exercise close
control over school curricula. Many of those countries also have
several "weeding-out" exams along the way, where students who don't
perform well enough are shunted off to vocational schools and don't
show up in the statistics that our education critics like to bash us
with. Not every country shows all of these properties but they all
show some of them, and, thinking about Russia and China, although
large, continue to exercise strong central control over education.
China also can be considered more homogeneous than we are. The other
countries also run their schools very differently from the way we do,
but is another thread entirely.

We who labor in the trenches have to realize, that the public (and
that includes us) want something from our educational system that is
probably impossible, and they are not willing to do the one thing
that might be able to fix it--create a national curriculum--so we
need to do the best we can with what they give us, and that probably
means that until students start seeing physics at the undergraduate
physics major level, their teachers will have to start over with
every course. It's a waste, but I don't see any motion toward
correcting it.

Let me add that I don't have much hope that any national curriculum
would be better or even as good as the best local curricula today. I
only argue that a standardized curriculum will allow us to reduce the
unnecessary duplication that our present system creates, and it just
might keep a few more students interested in science long enough to
start to generate the level of understanding we would like to see.

Hugh


> Ed Schweber (edschweb@ix.netcom.com)
> Fran Poodry criticizes me for saying
>
>   "I have become increasingly troubled that "good" high school
>     physics classes are increasingly becoming mirrors of college
>    classes. Only if we high school teachers run through Serway and
>    Faughn, Giancoli, Cutnell and Johnson, etc are we deemed to
>    be doing our jobs."
>
>   Obviously I am talking about trends and not specific teachers.
>
>    But many HS courses (even those that are not A.P.) use college textbooks
> and strive to cover a large chunk of them. What else are they doing besides
> mirroring college courses?
>
>    The problem is not with what college professors want but with what
> college admissions commitees want. Students perceive - I believe correctly
> so - that having a number of AP classes helps get them into selective
> colleges. Therefore, a college level class has become the criterion of a
> good high school course even if something else would be better for the
> students' intellectual development.
>
>    And of course, high schools compete among themselves on the basis of how
> many students get high AP scores. Here in New Jeresey, where Fran and I both
> teach, New Jersey Monthly magazine periodically gives numerical rankings to
> public schools with the number of AP classes offered being one of their
> criteria.
>
>   And when the book came out last year ( I forget it's exact title - but it
> had the word "class" in it, punning on school and social class) with the
> list of the top hundred schools nation wide in terms of how many students
> took AP exams - how many of us on this list didn't run out to get it?
>
> I once had an interview at a New Jersey public school where the pincipal
> told me he was looking for a teacher to cover both the mechanics and E&M
> AP-C syllabus to students whom he called unmotivated on their first exposure
> to physics.
>
>    My point was that fewer topics in more depth seems to be the better
> approach and it does seem to increasingly be what college teachers want -
> which is why I referred to  Sadler(? ) and Mazur.
> I still teach topics at AP depth or greater, but I don't push to cover
> everything. I like the AP test questions but was finding too many students
> who could get the questions right but who did not understand the material to
> my satisfaction.
>
>   And for the record - some of my students still do take the AP -B exam
> after some self study of topics I omitted - and typically get 4's and 5's.
>
> Ed Schweber


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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