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Re: bullets falling right



On Wed, 5 Nov 1997 21:04:52 -0600 (CST) Tim Burgess said:
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?
...
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?

From reading this list one might think that no concensus exists. However,
I just came across a rather nice statement in a book called Mathematical Method
s In Science, by George Polya, Published by The Mathematical Association of
America. "Isn't it a wonderful thing that idealization enables effective
investigation? For otherwise surely Nature's complexity would bury her laws
too deep for man to probe." Obviously, we will continue to teach from
idealized models, because without them we could not teach. However, honesty
should compel us to make it clear that these are idealizations and in at least
some cases we should point out what some of the idealizations are and also
at least suggest some steps that might be taken to refine our models and
remove some of the idealizations.