What should we be teaching?

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

Tim Burgess writes (from another thread):

> What should be the goal of those who attempting to teach science at the
> 6-12 level? Is science a fairly clear cut body of knowledge....with bullets
> that fall appropriately?
>
> I recently exchanged with a collegue concerning the struggles I have in
> teaching science along with the expected content. It seems to me that
> students who arrive at conclusions through experiences, through the testing
> and refinement of models or through careful logic learn "science" better.
>
> It was suggested that I should take some basic 100 level science courses
> again (I had them loing ago) to remind me of what science is really about.
>
> Is there a clear concensus on this? What message should we be getting about
> physics (or any science) in the middle or high school classroom?
>
> Tim

This is an excellent question, and one that deserves our thoughtful
consideration. What is the mix of "teaching physics" and "teaching about
physics" that we should do in our classes. As long as we have to assume
that our students know nothing of physics when they walk in our door, we
can't do as much of either as we would like. But if we ever got some sort
of unified physics program starting in, say, the 5th grade, that could
introduce students to some of the simple concepts and show them some of the
aspects of nature that we would like them to know before we get them in
11th or 12th grade, I think that we could do a lot more "teaching about
physics." In the end the students might even know more physics, because if
they know something about physics, then the actual physics we try to expose
them to will make much more sense.

As of right now, the students I teach (in a first-year course) will for the
most part not take another physics course, although more than a small
fraction will. With this mix, I think it is important that they get a lot
of the "about physics" stuff. For those whom this course is the terminal
one, they will get a little of how physicists look at the world and some of
the results, and a whole lot of why physicists do what they do and why it
is an important and worthwhile activity for some people (certainly not
everybody) to carry on. I hope that they will understand something about
experimental science and why it sometimes doesn't work as it was predicted
to. And I hope that they understand the importance of some of the
overarching ideas that physicists find important, like conservation laws
and symmetry, the importance of the interaction of experiment and theory,
etc. And I want them to know something of the interaction of physics with
history-how physics has influenced history and vice versa. I also want them
to know something of the giants of our past, the Galileos, Newtons,
Faradays, Maxwells, Einsteins and Feynmans, who have built the structure we
call physics. Most of all I want them to understand the axiom, that
"science is built up with facts, as a house is built with stones.  But a
collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."
(quotation due to Poincare).

Since college physics courses also start from scratch, my students who
learn the above about physics and who then go on to take more physics will
have the benefit of understanding more about physics than most of their
fellow students, even if they don't know any more of the facts. I contend
that they still have a head start on the others because they have a idea of
why the couse is made up of what it is, that is, they have some
appreciation of "the big picture." If you have read Sheila Tobias' book
"They're Not Dumb, They're Different," you know that the lack of that
insight is one of the main complaints people who started out is science but
left it had about their introductory courses.

So what I'm saying is that high school physics needs more of the "what is
physics about" stuff than the factual details, since if the student is
going on, the details will be provided later, and if the student is not
going on, then the details will soon be forgotten, but perhaps the "big
picture" will remain and the student will understand something about why
science is important, even if they don't become a scientist.

So there's my cut on what message we should be sending to our students.

Hugh


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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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