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

["Michael N. Monce" <mnmon@conncoll.edu>]

On Sat, 8 Nov 1997, kifer/belk wrote:

> I have read with interest all of the postings on this subject and feel
> the fundamental bone of contention is "what constitutes competence?"  I
> only teach high school and junior college, so my perspective would be
> quite different from those who supervise graduate students or even
> physics majors.  The level that I work at REQUIRES only the rudiments of
> physics (of course the more you know the more you can tie in the basics
> to some of the big questions in physics).  The whole subject area of
> "physics" suffers I feel from having too many with a great knowledge of
> physics and no great ability to teach.  It is a very simple thing to
> "present" information, but quite another to develop the subject in such
> a way that the average student grasps the conceptual logic and can use
> it to interpret his/her world.  It is quite hard to make it "easy".  I
> feel that for this a teacher needs a wide diversity of experience and
> expertise to be able to create or import analogies or appplications that
> enable this grasping.


	I've been thinking about this thread along with the previous
discussion on what constitutes a model in physics.  It seems to me that
physics is really a power series expansion.  On the left side of the
equation is nature, on the right is our best model for a particular
phenomenon.  Sometimes all we need is the first two terms of the series to
get good correspondence with nature, other times higher order terms are
needed.

	In teaching physics I think we must start out the students with
the first order term, only when they understand that do we add in the
higher order corrections.  For the case of our bullets being fired and
dropped, the first order term is the independence of the horizontal and
verticle components of the motion.  Only after the students understand
that should we introduce the higher order terms of friction, lift, etc.


					Mike Monce
					Connecticut College