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Re: [Phys-L] less is greater



This is why I am unhappy with the college board's decision to eliminate
AP-B and replace it with a two-year sequence, each with their own
end-of-year course. We currently have an 11th grade class that is an
honors-level survey course. Then, our AP class is officially a B course
but covers enough material so that those students who opt to take the C
exam can do that as well. That sequence lets us spiral. Topic after
topic, we revisit, review and then go deeper. And MANY students say things
like "wow, this seems so much easier this year".

If we change to teach AP physics 1 and then AP physics 2, we lose the
spiral. Also, students who only want one year of high school physics lose
their survey. Not sure what we are going to do yet...


On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 6:35 AM, John Denker <jsd@av8n.com> wrote:

In the context of:

A big part of teaching involves biting one's tongue, not saying
everything that could be said.


On 10/22/2013 12:29 AM, jbellina wrote:
I work mostly with elementary teachers who want to "help" their
students. This piece of advice is so important, and so hard for them
to do. I tell them that when they help by telling too much, they rob
their students of much of the joy of learning.

That's a good point. Student "ownership" is super-important.

Here are additional arguments that lead to the same conclusion:

By way of analogy: If you are visiting Paris for a few days, you
should *not* try to see every possible museum on your first trip.
Plan on coming back!

Applying this to teaching: There is a lot of value in the *spiral*
approach. Plan on revisiting each topic several times. It will
mean a lot more the Nth time around, because the students will be
better able to connect it to other things they know. Connections
are important.

It's painful to tell an eager student "That's a really good question,
ask me again in six weeks" ... but sometimes it has to be done.

The problem is exacerbated by the typical text, which does not
properly support the spiral approach. For example, the text
might discuss harmonic oscillators in chapter X and nowhere else.
This would be "logical" if you were writing an encyclopedia,
but for a textbook it's just insane.

This is connected to another problem, namely that textbook
/adoption/ decisions are not made by the students. However,
that's a whole different rant.

One traditional, reasonable way to spiralize things is to include
lots of cross references: "We shall revisit this in chapters
P and Q. Additional implications and ramifications will be
discussed in chapters Y and Z." This is particularly convenient
when using HTML, but it is perfectly doable even when using the
dead-trees medium. It's not easy to put the cross-references
in, but it needs to be done.

Spiraling back to Joe's point about student ownership: It is
important for students -- not just teachers -- to understand
the spiral approach, to understand the importance of learning
things "out of order". One manifestation of this is the art
of /skimming/ a chapter (or an entire book) on the first pass,
and then coming back to ponder it more carefully. This is not
an easy thing to do! It is not a skill that anybody was born
with, but it can be learned.

I'm talking about student ownershp of the learning *process*
not just ownership of physics factoids.

I'm not sure they
believe me even after they have experienced it themselves.

That may be ... but on the other hand, the converse holds
for sure: if they have /not/ experienced it for themselves
they are guaranteed not to believe it.

By that I mean that a teacher who has never seen the spiral
approach done properly will not have the confidence that we
really will revisit the topic later, and will therefore be
tempted to overexplain things the first time around.
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