[Phys-L] critical thinking, again

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 12/14/2013 12:55 PM, Anthony Lapinski remarked on:
>  ..... how poor their
> reasoning skills are.              [a]

> Then again, most classes do not involve
> critical/logical thinking.         [b]

Statement [b] is the understatement of the year.

Statement [a] is tricky.  It might be better to say that 
/in the classroom/, students exhibit remarkably poor reasoning 
skills.  My point is that the same students do much better in 
a non-classroom setting.  In particular, the games that they
play often involve high levels of symbolism, abstraction, 
strategy, and reasoning.

I used to work in the game industry, and I made a lot of
money by assuming that kids are smart, way smarter than
most people give them credit for.

By the time they show up in physics class, kids have been
thoroughly trained for 10+ years that critical thinking is 
not permitted on school grounds.  It has no upside.  It's 
extra work, and it causes nothing but trouble.

The fact that you can have a science book with 1000 errors in 
1000 pages and nobody seems to care is partly a symptom and 
partly a cause.  It's not like nobody notices.  The students 
notice.  They just learn not to care.

This is an old, old story.  It is the triumph of conformity 
over creativity, the triumph of regimentation over reasoning.

You can change this over time, over the course of the year,
if you really really work at it.  OTOH you shouldn't expect
to see anything resembling critical reasoning on the placement
test on the first day of class.