Re: [Phys-l] Physics job opening in Texas for 2008-09

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 15:09  -0700 5/11/08, Bernard Cleyet wrote, regarding teaching HS 
with a PhD:
> It gets in the way, as some students told me!
It can if you let it, but it can also be liberating. For example, 
someone whose credentials in the subject are assured is free to say, 
"I don't know the answer to that," if in fact they don't. I've known 
any number of teachers who are literally afraid to admit that they 
don't know something, and have become good at giving nonsense answers 
that appear to make sense to questions they are really clueless about.

As for the rest, if someone wants to learn what teaching methods seem 
to work best, they will, and if they want to try to remember how it 
felt when they didn't understand some basic concept, they will. Their 
degree of education doesn't matter. What is important is their 
willingness to learn, and although it is certainly not guaranteed, 
someone with a PhD *should* be willing to learn.

One thing that bothers me about many (but certainly not all) high 
school teachers is their willingness to deal with individual problems 
as isolated events and not try to tie them into the fabric of the 
subject, so their students learn how to solve dozens of different 
types of problems without ever realizing the connections between 
them, and end up missing the entire point of the course. 
Unfortunately, this is not just true of physics, but of much of 
pre-college education (and I've seen it worm its way into college 
curricula as well). We all know of the students who arrive in their 
physics class directly from their math class, yet cannot apply the 
skills they learned in math to their physics problems. IMO, whether 
or not they have a PhD, the most important thing a teacher can learn, 
and then work to impart to their students, is how to approach a 
problem as an example of this or that principle, and then be able to 
apply that principle to solving it. If, for example, the teacher 
hasn't helped the students to understand that all problems involving 
masses, ropes and pulleys are basically variants on Atwood's machine, 
and not a whole bunch of disconnected problems, the solutions to 
which have to be separated memorized, has failed his or her students 
in a major way.

I believe the guy who said something to the effect, "I have learned 
how to solve only three types of physics problems--but luckily, I 
have always been able to reduce any problem I have come across to one 
of those three," had a PhD.

Hugh
--

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

(919) 467-7610

Hard work often pays off after time. But Laziness always pays off now.

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