Re: Is competence in physics as a requirement for teachers of physics?

["Donald E. Simanek" <dsimanek@eagle.lhup.edu>]

On Thu, 6 Nov 1997 SANDINT@athena.ncat.edu wrote:

> You can no more teach what you don't know
> than you can come back from where you haven't been.

>    Supposedly a quote from an old teacher in the North Carolina
>    mountains. 

Thank you for being the first to discern the point I was making when I
suggested that one shouldn't attempt to teach what one doesn't know
thoroughly. One could at this point quote Galileo: "You can't teach anyone
anything, you can only help them find it within themselves." The problems
which gave rise to this thread were examples of attempting to *teach* in
the sense of making declarative statements as if they were dogma. "This is
the way it is" sort of declamatory "teaching". Or, if I recall, something
like "The time it takes the bullet fired horizontally to reach the ground
is the same as if it were simply dropped" asserted as something to be
memorized and spewed back on exams. There's too much of that sort
of "teaching" going on, and not enough of student "learning". And since we
are all learners throughout life, we never know anything perfectly, so we
have no business "teaching" dogmatic assertions as if they were chiseled
in stone.

	-- Donald

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Dr. Donald E. Simanek                            Office: 717-893-2079
Prof. of Physics                    Internet: dsimanek@eagle.lhup.edu
Lock Haven University, Lock Haven, PA. 17745          CIS: 73147,2166 
Home page: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek            FAX: 717-893-2047
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