I have a question for those of you who teach physics in small undergraduate
schools where faculty resources preclude teaching the entire menu of
possible physics courses: How do you decide which courses (beyond the intro
level) to offer? And what do you do when you have one or two really good
students who really could benefit from advanced topic X but obviously the
administration won't let you offer a course for two students even if you
wanted to?
A related question for anyone who has taken any university physics courses:
Did you get to take all of the courses you would have liked to if your
school(s) had offered you anything your heart desired? For instance, how
many physicists on this list have never had a course in say general
relativity or modern optics or
nuclear physics? Most undergraduate curricula do not include such courses.
But most people don't take those in graduate school either (at least I did
not at Cornell) because the goal there is to do research and not to take
courses in every subfield of physics. But it just makes me wonder sometimes
if we're teaching the right subjects or just beating our students down with
course after course in classical mechanics and E+M? Should black holes,
quarks, nonlinear optics, etc. be left to be learned largely on one's own
(except for the quickest peek here and there) if you don't happen to
specialize in grad school in these fields?
Dr. Carl E. Mungan, Assistant Professor http://www.uwf.edu/~cmungan/
Dept. of Physics, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL 32514-5751
office: 850-474-2645 (secretary -2267, FAX -3323) email: cmungan@uwf.edu