Re: [Phys-L] foundations of physics: special relativity

[Richard Tarara <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

In Ancient times (1960s) I my first encounter with vectors was in my 
senior year HS physics course, and this was at a highly respected 
College-Prep HS.  The fact that there was a Calculus class offered was 
unusual for the day.

Not sure when vectors show up (if at all) today, but I would suspect 
that most math teachers working with them might opt to concentrate on 
the component method.  For my Algebra based courses I used to do a 
mapping lab (using local maps) with a series of directions (throwing in 
some simple kinematics) to find one's way around to some 'clever' 
destination from campus.  Three methods were used--constructing vectors 
right on the maps, constructing scale vectors on graph paper and then 
laying out only the resultant on the map, and breaking each step into 
East/West and North/South components to construct the final resultant 
vector. Then, as was my preference, we dealt with most multi-dimensional 
problems by breaking them down into one-dimensional problems through 
deconstruction and then possibly reconstruction of the 2 or 3 
dimensional vectors involved.  Again, my guess is this would be the 
approach of most HS math/physics teachers.

rwt

On 10/3/2015 3:21 PM, John Clement wrote:
> Actually I did not encounter vectors until HS, so the editoral you probably
> does not apply to most people on this list.
>
> John M. Clement
> Houston, TX
>
>
> _______________________________________________ Forum for Physics 
> Educators Phys-l@www.phys-l.org 
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Richard Tarara
Professor Emeritus
Saint Mary's College

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