Re: [Phys-l] STUDY SUGGESTS NO CHILD LAW MAY BE DUMBING DOWNSTUDENTS

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 10:46  -0600 11/4/08, Paul Lulai wrote:
> Regarding re-teaching:  In my opinion... a big problem a lot of teachers
> are a slave to the textbook.  For some reason each science textbook
> seems to start with the blasted metric system.  For crying out loud,
> skip it.  Measurement, skip it.  Conversions, skip it.  Trig, skip it.
> Teach them in the course (my opinion).

Some interesting points here. A lot of teachers are slaves to a 
textbook for two reasons: 1) that's the way they were taught, and 2) 
they don't know any more than what's in the textbook (if even that) 
that they are using, so they hang onto the textbook like a life 
preserver. The obvious solution is to change the way prospective 
teachers are taught in college, and make damned sure they know more 
than their students are expected to know when they finish the course. 
Teachers who know only what they need to teach their students cannot 
have much confidence in their ability to do even that, and that has 
to affect the way they teach--IOW becoming a slave to a textbook 
because that's all they know.

As for the metric system, if we don't start teaching it to the kids 
from the beginning, the US will continue to be the only nation of 
consequence in the world with the archaic system of units we are 
presently stuck with, so I think we need to put the kids on a 
metric-only diet all the way through school. Besides, it just makes 
logical sense to teach a system based on multiples of ten, rather 
than one that seems to be based on whatever number system the monarch 
at the time was familiar enough with to be able to count in it.

Measurement. This is the whole basis of science, so it does need to 
be taught, but only at levels that are age appropriate--and I've seen 
lots of cases where the measurements required were totally 
inconsistent with what the kids could do. They need to do collecting 
and counting in the primary grades. By fourth grade they should start 
lengths and times, and by the time they get to middle school they can 
figure out how to do areas and volumes of other than regular shapes, 
and start on learning about weight and mass. Simple areas and volumes 
should be done in math class, in connection with learning 
multiplication.

Unit conversions. I totally agree. Unit conversions are only useful 
after the students understand the physical concepts that the units 
are being used to measure. And using the metric system makes most 
unit conversions much simpler. Forget about conversions between US 
standard and metric units. By the time they get old enough to need 
that stuff, they can figure it out for themselves. And with luck, by 
then the anachronistic US standard system will have died a merciful 
death.

Trig. I also agree. Teach physics in one dimension until they 
understand the concepts, then worry about the trig stuff, but only 
after they have seen it in a math class.

Hugh
--

************************************************************
Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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