On 07/30/2013 08:17 AM, jbellina wrote a nice note about what
to avoid: don't abuse the students, don't scare them, don't
assign problems they can't handle.
On any list of DOs and DON'Ts, that's a fine place to start.
Continuing down that road, let's discuss one more DON'T, and
then a few DOs.
DON'T ask students to learn stuff that cannot possibly be true.
Wrong stuff is a huge demotivator. Also, it rewards the lowest
form of rote learning, and penalizes critical thinking. Avoiding
this is a lot of work, because the textbooks are full of errors.
Back in the 1960s, people were able to write fat books (PSSC,
Feynman) with only a handful of genuine physics errors (not
counting superficial typos). Nowadays in a 1000-page book, you
can find hundreds of conceptual errors.
DO provide plenty of motivation. This is a tricky business,
because different students are motivated by different things.
*) Using /grades/ to motivate students is IMHO the last resort.
It's artificial. It's extrinsic. It leads to all sorts of
perverse incentives. I would much rather see a situation where
the student says "this course is intrinsically so interesting
that even if I thought I would get a D- I would still take
the course."
*) Modeling has been mentioned. That's a valuable technique,
but it's still just a means to the end, not a goal unto itself.
*) Some students are highly competitive, and can be motivated
by a contest. One classic example applicable to high-school
physics is to have each student build a small trebuchet, small
enough to fit into a 12" cube. The goal is to achieve maximum
distance of throw.
On the other hand, having one student compete against another
is invidious. Sometimes it's better to have everybody work
together as a team to compete against the world record.
Also, there are some students (and some parents!) who object
to the very idea of a trebuchet, because it is a weapon, and
weapons should not be allowed in school.
*) More generally, there is lots of interesting real-world physics.
The idea is to get students to the point where they really want
to do project X, and therefore they demand to know more physics.
Again, this is tricky because different students are interested
in different things. Standard topics include things like:
-- physics of NASCAR
-- physics of bicycles
-- physics of airplanes
-- physics of baseball
-- physics of cooking
-- physics of weather and climate
-- physics of the renewable energy industry
The last two items have a lot of appeal: Hey, we're saving the world!
The first item has lots of appeal to rednecks.
The second item has the advantage that /part/ of it is quite simple.
The third item has the advantage that knowing a little bit of physics
makes it noticeably easier to learn how to fly well, in ordinary
situations and especially in emergency situations.
*) Perhaps most importantly, it is worth convincing students that
the techniques learned in physics class are /portable/ from one
topic to another.
Do you like money? Everybody likes money. Do you like cookies?
Everybody likes cookies. Now, suppose you want to go into the cookie
business. You need to optimize the recipe and optimize the price point,
trading off higher price against lower sales-volume et cetera. Now,
the mindless approach is to fiddle around with all the possibilities
until you find something that works. However, you will do better
if you build a mathematical model and experiment on the model. By
optimizing the model, you make your cookie business more profitable.
This can make the difference between success and failure.
There are a lot of physics majors working as business consultants
and/or working as quants on Wall Street. They spend all day building
models and optimizing them.