Re: [Phys-l] Sir, Can We Do Something Easier?

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Unfortunately this anecdotal evidence always comes from people in the field
who "survived" conventional education.  You are seeing people who by this
account are already engaging in hypothetical deductive reasoning and using
imagination in science.  The spark may be there, but it can only enflame if
the mind is capable of reasoning.  Remember that there is evidence now that
students in the UK are less capable of scientific reasoning than 30 years
ago.  This is probably also true in the US.

I have already seen the results of courses which make science popular.  In
my school IPC is popular and the teacher is beloved, but students come out
with statistically zero on the FCI or FMCE.  At the school that my children
went to, they had a very popular physics course.  My son learned essentially
zero, and I had to go back over it during the summer to bring him up to
speed.  Popularity does not work when the cognitive side is not properly
attended to.

There is a large amount of evidence that learning requires that the students
be confronted with their misconceptions, and that produces confusion.  The
confusion then produces negative feelings.  If the students have been
accustomed to this, they will deal with it and then make progress.  But the
current conventional methods of teaching are designed to make students
comfortable enough that the learning is quite low.

The real test, is not the number of students in the HS physics class, but
how many actually go on in science, and how many come out with higher
thinking skills, and more knowledge of physics concepts.  The formal
operational thinkers will survive if they have initiative, and the rest will
fall by the wayside.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> I sya, "Nuts!"
>
> There is plenty of evidence that it is a matter of the personality of the
> teacher.  Just for a non-physics starter, walk into a popular neighborhood
> bar (or pub, if you're English; or Officer's Club, if you're in service)
> and you'll find someone holding an audience spellbound with a description
> of the grass growing, day-to-day, in his back yard.
>  	 I did my student teaching in the late '80's at a public high school
> of about 1800.  The head of the science department was a physics teacher,
> and he'd made the course so popular that the school required 3 physics
> teachers to handle the load, plus one or two additional to teach the
> earth science course.
>  	You have already met the enemy, and, truly, he is us, as is
> probably evident from the postings on this net.  I believe that the
> missing art, for many, is the art of communicating at the emotional (as
> opposed to intellectual) level, what it was that you found to be fun about
> physics.
>  	To avoid leaving you with a vague generality, let me pass on what
> a young graduate student once told me about why she became an
> archeologist: "When I was a little girl, I fell in love with the garbage
> man who would drive by our house each day in a truck with a huge load of
> what must have been all sorts of wonderful things."
>  	If you can communicate with the students at the level of the
> mystery of the garbage man then you will, I suspect attract the students
> to your class.  On the other hand, if you pontificate about the "fun of
> physics" ... eat your heart out.
>  				Regards,
>  					Jack