Re: Jackson on Jackson

[palmer@sfu.ca (Leigh Palmer)]

> > What has changed since the fifties?
> >
> > Leigh
>
> Been listening to Bob Dole speeches lately, Leigh?

It's too bad youth doesn't listen. If you read what I said you will
see that clearly the question is not meant to be entirely rhetorical.
What I want to know is this: what is it that is different now from
the state of the society in the fifties which would change the
effectiveness of traditional teaching methods and require us to
change our methods? Is there an alternative to changing our methods?
While the answer to the first question is emphatically "Yes", the
answer to the second is not in my opinion. I was once enthralled to
TV and I got well, in no small part due to being exposed to the best
of traditional teaching.

Since it's my straw man I'll start kicking the stuffing out of it.
One thing that is different now from what it was in the fifties is
the production values that are the hallmark of modern entertainment
media. I have actually heard the opinion expressed that we must
adopt higher production values in our presentations to compete! That
is a spineless response to solving the problem TV presents us. That
problem is best solved in the home by parents who point out the lack
of depth in multimillion dollar productions like "Cosmos", and the
blatant antiintellectualism of others like "Bill Nye the Science Guy".
Since we physics teachers don't have access to our students at the
toilet training stage, and since their parents in many cases don't
seem to be up to the task of properly orienting them, I submit that
it is our duty to win them back by exhibiting something of
conspicuous value in our presentations: an understanding of Nature.
Precious time devoted to altering our medium to resemble TV will be
both futile (because of a lack of resources) and counterproductive
in respect to delivering the message. Marshall McLuhan was wrong;
the medium is not the message. In order to get the message students
will have to learn to extract it the old fashioned way: they will
have to work for it. If they have not learned that by the time they
get to you then you must demonstrate it to them by example.

Leigh

(I was raised with TV since 1947 when our whole family watched KTLA
or W6XAO all through dinner on our 12" Hoffman Easy-Vision. It was
like a sixth member of the family, taking up one side of the long
white dinner table and monopolizing the conversation throughout.
Fortunately the production values were then insufficiently
compelling to hold us in thrall for long, and we got well. Perhaps
students do not get well so quickly nowadays, but we should help
them to do so rather than trying to compete in the TV game. We'll
surely lose (first our intellectual integrity, then our students)
in the end if we adopt the latter strategy.)