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

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

> 	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

If we can't do anything else, we physics teachers love to up with great
metaphors, and this is one of the best. As long as the students know that
there are all those other terms out there, and that someday they may have
to deal with some of them, it should keep everybody happy to restrict our
vision to only those terms we need to make sense of a given problem.

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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