Re: Memorization and terminal physics course

[palmer@sfu.ca (Leigh Palmer)]

> Recently, several people contributed personal antecdotes and philosophies
> regarding the utility of shallow learning (my term) in their early physics
> classes, as this facilitated deeper learning upon revisitating the same topics
> in later classes and life experiences. I agree that this can be a very useful
> process for those students who will be revisiting, in a formal way, the topics
> covered in first courses in physics.  This, I gathered, was the point of the
> original posts.
>
> I would like to add that this same idea is a strong argument for applying the
> "less is more" philosophy to classes for non-physics majors.  Specifically, it
> argues for a de-emphasis of the memorization required by the chapter-per-week-
> of-the-physics-encyclopedia approach, and argues for conceptual change
> approaches in such classes. If the students in a class most likely will never
> again encounter the material in a classroom, it would be best to give
> them the time to go through the assimilation process, so that they might be
> able to recognize and apply the concepts when encountered in life.

Which conceptual developments do you consider the most likely candidates
for inclusion in such a course? I think you will find that if you assemble
a random chosen committee with more than two members you will get enough
topics to overfill any course. I certainly would not leave thermodynamics
out of a course intended to be applied to the students' real lives. When
that is included and developed in some depth you won't find a lot of room
left for anything else.

I think that building a course on the criterion of applicability of
concepts to "life" is wrong-headed. Why would one teach physics to, say,
musicians in this manner? Would you also advocate teaching music to
physicists with the same selection criteria? I know that I would not want
to take such a course in music; I want to know what musicians think is
neat stuff. In a similar vein I don't think that a musician would like to
see relativity, black holes, and elementary particles left out of her
curriculum even though she will likely never encounter them in life.

Leigh