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Here's another analogy: At many universities, the music department
offers a "music appreciation for dummies" course. The students listen
to music and talk about it. There is little if any open-endedness.
This stands in contrast to the course in composition & orchestration
that is taken by music majors, by real musicians, where originality
and artistry are required. There is a great deal of structure, but
also a great deal of open-endedness.
I mention this because all too often, the introductory physics course
degenerates into "physics appreciation for dummies". The students
are on the outside looking in. The students look at physics and talk
about physics, but they don't actually /do/ any physics. In particular,
a) They do not engage in any creative or open-ended activities, and
b) they cannot imagine that there ever could be any creativity or
imagination (let alone artistry) in physics.
I insist that it doesn't have to be this way. Physics, even at the
introductory level, does not have to be a mindless, joyless, multiple-
guess activity.
Suggestion: Whenever selecting or creating quiz questions, include a goodly
proportion of open-ended questions. Whenever I see a multiple-guess question,
I wince, and then ask myself whether it could be converted into an open-ended
question.
If you say multiple-choice questions save a lot of time, because they are
easier to grade, then I respond as follows: If we are going to talk about
savings, we need to talk about the costs, too. The cost of overemphasizing
short-answer multiple-guess tests is that they defeat the purpose of the
entire educational system. The cost exceeds your entire salary plus overhead
and more than that besides. Ask the kids whether they would rather learn
a small number of truly useful things, or be "exposed to" a huge number of
useless things that they won't remember anyway.
More specifically: You can't fetch stuff out of your memory in a good way
if you didn't put it into your memory in a good way. This helps explain
why the current overemphasis on fully-scripted problem-solving and multiple-
guess quizzes is so poisonous. If there is a script for solving every
problem that is going to be on the state test, then students naturally get
the idea that rote learning is sufficient. The hallmark of rote learning
is that each idea can be recalled in exactly one way. Technically that
counts as a memory, but it is not a very /useful/ memory. The smart approach
is to mull over each new idea, checking it against previously-known ideas,
looking for connections ... and, conversely, checking for inconsistencies.
If you do this, each idea can be recalled in 100 different ways, which
makes it 100 times more /useful/ than a rote memory.
"So it is with this class. You've spent 12 years learning how to
play trivial pursuits, and there's nothing wrong with that, but
in this class we are playing a whole nother game, It has different
rules, and requires different equipment and different skills. For
starters, rather than touching on a large number of trivial problems,
we are going to solve a small number of important problems. There
will be lots of open-ended questions, and relatively few multiple-
guess questions. There will be few if any questions that can be
answered in 45 seconds. Creativity and originality will be encouraged."
"We will not do hard problems. We will however do problems that
/would have been hard/ if you hadn't learned the right techniques."
You'll have to give that speech multiple times before anybody believes
you ... and then you have to deliver. They've heard (most of) that
speech before, from people who didn't mean it and/or didn't even
understand what they were saying.