Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: what are the labs for?



My approach in both the high school course I teach as well as the course
I teach at the local junior college is very different from my
colleagues. At the community college I am in the "lab room" on both
nights rather than being in a lecture room for one night and the lab on
the other. Consequently I do between 22 and 26 activities during a
semester. Many of these are essentially illustrative activities done as
part of the lecture (e.g. index of refraction, coefficient of friction)
and take about 10 minutes. Some are traditional plug and chug
college-level physics labs where propagation of error is probably as
emphasized as is any concept being illustrated.
Many are simply activities the provide my knowledge rich, but
experience poor students the opportunity to do many of the things that I
used to take for granted as things that were done during childhood. In
today's over protected, politically correct environment many students
aren't allowed to play with sharp objects or do other "dangerous" things
that were once commonplace (e.g. mixing paints and colored flashlight
beams, playing with optics like lenses and mirrors, or just hooking up
batteries and bulbs to see what happens.)
The class I teach is the standard algebra-based physics for non-majors
(I realize that tose of you teaching courses for majors have some
different pressures and responsibilities) and I do some other things
differently than my peers. I am sometimes chastised by colleagues
because I don't have class averages on exams of 40% and am challenged as
not being rigorous enough (none of these accusers, however, are willing
to accept my challenge that I give their tests sight-unseen if they will
give their students my tests sight-unseen because they find my tests
equally rigorous and more thorough than theirs). The main difference is
that - perhaps because of my high school training - I believe in telling
students what is important, giving practice over what is important and
testing what I feel is important. I don't try and trick anybody. It is
easy to make physics hard. My challenge to those on this network is to
make difficult ideas easy and non-threatening.
My goal is to produce a scientifically literate population and to
produce students that are able to answer a 9-year old's questions - no
esoteric terminology, no reliance on equations as a pretense of an
explanation. As Feynman recognized when he was unable to develop a
freshman level lecture explaining QED - if you can not explain an idea
in simple terms then you really don't understand the underlying idea.
Recognizing that a detailed description or prediction based on a theory
may well require the use of powerful mathematics, the underlying ideas
are generally straightforward and these are what must be grasped if you
hope to make these ideas the part of someone's intellectual repertoire.
I challenge those of you who take pride in a class average of 40% to
evaluate the basis of that pride. I don't take pride if most of my
students don't get what I felt was important enough to test over. If
you have a 40% average can you really claim to have TAUGHT that material
(recognize that presenting is not teaching)?
I know I am somewhat rambling and am perhaps overly strident in my
claims, but partly I am intimidated by the greater physical knowledge of
those on this list and partly I have long been aggravated by what I
consider a poor job of TEACHING done in some of the 4 year institutions
of which I am familiar (and only those I know - I make no blanket
accusations). I have worked long and hard to dispel the idea that
physics is difficult, pedantic and esoteric. To this end I have
provided over 300 workshops to teachers in the last 20 years. Audiences
have ranged from college instructors to kindergarten teachers. Make
physics easy (not incorrect, not "watered-down" for your intended
audience) and straightforward. Show students the simple concepts first,
give them labs that illustrate this as an integral part of the concept
development and then allow them to extend their reach into making
predictions or examining inter-related phenomena.

Greg Kifer
"Mother Nature may be subtle, but she is not deceitful." A. Einstein.