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On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Dewey Dykstra, Jr. wrote:
One might still be tempted to focus on the notion that we cannot 'cover' as
much material by "the Workshop Physics" approach. To this I ask, why do we
have to wait until college to accomplish all this stuff? Much of this
could be accomplished before or by the 9th grade, but all of the teachers
come to the university and get taught the traditional way. But they could
be taught differently, yet *we* do not do this. In a better world, if we
choose to make one, I can imagine that students would have done alot or
most of the conceptual front end by the time they get to college and in
doing so would not only have changed their initial notions, but the major
lesson would NO LONGER BE that *they* cannot make new sense of the
phenomena. Now that I could live with much better!
Dewey
I think Dewey has found the core of our problem with the intro
course. We teach it as if these students already have had expsoure to
these concepts from high school and before. This has been driven home to
me in the last few years when the college started to admit more foreign
students who have seen physics throughout much of their pre-college
schooling. They don't "breeze" through the intro. course, but it is not
the big mystery and/or frightening experience it is to the Americans.
Mike Monce
Connecticut College