Re: understand understanding, simple explanations, etc.

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

At 7:54 PM -0800 2/11/98, Ken Fox wrote, commenting on my rainbow
lecture plan:

> Your plan is very much like the plan I do use to help students gain an
> understanding for the way ligh behaves to make a rainbow. I do this as
> part of a study of color. In a "concptual" High school course we are not
> as constrained as you are.

If (and only if) your plan includes the rotation of the prism and a
proper explanation of what happens is your plan very much like my plan.
Donald's modification makes the point even better. Do you do that part?
It can be approached graphically, with ray diagrams*; one need not do
the usual calculus derivation to get the point across, but the rainbow
cannot be understood without it.

Leigh

* This, I maintain, is a kind of mathematics - geometry.