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Re: devil's advocate (? one wonders...)



It was written,

What we *can* say, I suppose, is two things: traditional approaches
(non-watered-down) are a dismal failure any way you wish to measure
them except for the fortunate few who would not have needed us
anyway.

I'm not so sure I agree that the traditional approaches are such an obvious
dismal failure for the introductory course for scientists and engineers.
The proof is simply the fact that these courses have produced more
scientists and engineers then society has been able to find jobs for. Just
sit on a position search committee for a job opening and you'll see what I
mean. You get faced with hundreds of applications, almost all of which are
reasonably qualified and most of whom presumably had a traditional
introductory course.

The above is just something to chew on; I'm not totally sure where I stand,
but I do respect the opinions of people who have been at this for 20-30
years. Reread the many editorials by Clifford Schwartz in "The Physics
Teacher".

That's all for the moment.

Joel

Well, as one whose experience is now all too close to 30 years, I have to
point out that having degrees and applying for positions, etc. has little
to do with the measures referred to in the quoted passage. We recently had
a search which yielded about 350 applicants, but these applicants are from
a pool that consists of less than 1% of all the people who have ever had
physics instruction in their lives.

The reason that we see so many applicants per position is not that the
world is swamped by the successes of our instruction, but that there are so
few positions available (and we have fax and word processing to support the
enterprise of making applications.) A case *might* even be made that there
are so few positions available is another possible measure attributable to
a kind of failure of the educational responsibilities of our profession.

It strikes me that when we do consider the numbers (I generated a
calculation last year of relative numbers of student-instruction-hours in
physics, teachers and students at all levels, elementary, middle/jr, high
school, college non-majors, college and graduate majors.), suggesting that
those who become physics majors might have done much of what they have
accomplished in spite of us in intro classes (HS & College) is hard to
dismiss on numbers alone. Less than 1% of all people who receive physics
instruction become physicists.

The author of the quote explicitly excludes this group ("fortunate few who
would not have needed us"), yet the response addresses ONLY this group. It
is hardly confidence inspiring or convincing to argue success on less than
1% of the students that experience some aspect of our enterprise. (I hope
that demotion to devil's law clerk or legal assistant is not forthcoming,
but with defenses like this one has to wonder. ;^)

The one thing learned by 99+% of all who have some physics instruction and
probably the only lasting thing measured as surviving decades is NOT
anything from the canon of physics, instead it is that:

there is something that they can neither do nor understand and that only
certain special people can.

Can we really be *proud* of this 'picture' of what we are doing to society
just because we happen to have plenty who become physicists?

There's lots of things wrong with this 'picture', just to name a few:
1. Again, it dismisses 99+% of the people who have any physics
instruction, which in most 'first world' and maybe 'second world' countries
is most of the population. I doubt that any physical theory which
dismisses 99+% of the available data would be found acceptible in the
physics community, so why does it make sense to do so here?
2. The physics instruction upon which people base this "lesson learned"
proports to be about physical phenomena when instead it is almost
exclusively about the conclusions *others* (those special people who *can*)
have reached about the phenomena and training in the vocational practices
of professional physicists.
3. The research in physics education literature is full of examples that
physics instruction does not have to be this way.

But, then maybe this IS the goal; to elevate ourselves and put others down.
(Why else are we so proud of our effect on conversations at social
gatherings?) Or, maybe to put it more gently, maybe the goal IS to troll
through society to find all with "true" potential and discard the 'chaff."
If either is the case then we are spectacularly successful!

A simple place to begin, as far as I'm concerned, would be to reserve the
vocational training strictly for physics and engineering majors and for
everyone else (K - 12) and college non-science majors develop courses in
which the *students'* understanding concerning the *phenomena* are the
object of attention. I think even the physics and engineering majors would
be all the better for this approach of partitioning the thrust of courses
at the different levels.




+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/SN318 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad@varney.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938

"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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