Re: ??? ??? ???=the nature of students

[laldrich@miseri.edu]

Asking why students are so passive implies passivity in many different
situations; as children growing up (Mike Monce's example), as students in
pre-college classrooms (by the way Ludwik, in what grade/class do you think
students should have learned about the moon if they weren't inquisitive
enough to figure it out themselves?), in our own classrooms, and maybe in
general.

The pat answer is TV and video games have made them passive.  But we have
more students going to college now than did when many of us were college
students.  Maybe these students are also just different than we were (and
very few of them are physics majors as we were).

My experience with preservice elementary teachers is that very few of them
are involved when the class is taught through the method of lecturing.
They are much more involved when the course is taught using
inquiry/investigative methods of teaching/learning and learn (understand)
more.

I see a growing division among AAPT members supporting either the "reform"
or the "traditional" methods of teaching.  But our primarily concern should
always be what students learn, which should help us determine how we should
"teach".  One problem we have is that we may not know really know from our
testing and evaluation methods what these students do or do not understand
and we don't seem to all agree as to what we think they should learn.

Another problem is that we have different types of students with different
backgrounds and different goals/needs which involve physics.  I won't ever
lecture again to preservice elementary students based on my experiences
with those students.  

I struggle with what I can do to make my algebra-based intro course
(non-science majors) a course which involves the students more and still
"covers" material I've been told I need for the students in the course.
Every few years I ask the "user" departments what their needs are, and I'm
gradually going to narrow them down to see if I can do less lecturing and
more involved learning on the part of the students.

Science majors and physics majors are yet another group(s) of students with
different backgrounds, interests and needs.

We do our students and our discussions a great disservice when we lump all
of these kinds of students together and discuss what to do in THE physics
course.  We need to begin to be more specific about which students we are
talking about and what our goals for them are.  Ludwig's students are not,
in my experience, the kind of students who will get involved in a class
unless they are actively "doing science".

Lynn Aldrich

At 01:37 PM 9/5/97 -0400, you wrote:
> Ludwik has (again) started an interesting thread, which I will paraphrase
> into "Why are so many of our students so passive?"
>
> Mike Monce has already pointed out one reason, that they are seldom
> encouraged to examine the world around them with either a sense of
> curiosity or one of wonder.  Simulations and special effects are more
> spectacular, so why play with something so dull as a magnifier?  I saw a
> recent cartoon (Shoe?) in which a computer game was so close to the real
> world that the "student" found it boring, prefering instead the "virtual
> reality" game.
>
> I propose another aspect of their conditioning, that they have been trained
> to expect a particular kind of "education" which loosely translates as "I
> will tell you the answer before I ask the question, and will only ask those
> questions for which I have already given the answer."  Poor Ludwik asked
> them a question for which he hadn't told them the answer!
>
>
>
> George Spagna           **********************************************
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