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Re: Reality



also need to recognize that students are different. In
l950--OK, I'm giving it away--when I was in high school--I
don't believe instruction in the sciences was any better,
BUT many of the students had spent time working with an old
car (mechanical and electrical training) or working on a
HI-FI (circuits and electronics). Now everything is on a
microchip and nobody has to look at wires. Modern
electronics, particularly the digital kind, is not very
helpful because it has gotten separated from the physical
science. You put a 3-volt pulse in here and an amplified
pulse comes out here is not very much related to physics.
If we are going to develop a feeling for how a physical
system behaves; how the principles of physics determine its
behavior; and how to model it mathematically, we will need
to do a lot of basic work which is not easy. WBN

We can do this instead of lecturing (or alongside lecturing even) in
the nontraditional courses like Chabay & Sherwood; Law's Workshop
Physics; CalTech/MIT's ZAP! etc. We can and should do a lot to remedy
this missing critical phenomenological experience even at the expense
of lecturing. If our student nonmajors don't have this experience before
our courses and don't get it in our courses then WE GRADUATE THEM WITHOUT
IT. How many of us graduate students who can't describe how a light bulb
works or how a current-carrying coil experiences torque in a magnetic
field but can solve series and parallel resistor problems and perhaps
even Kirchhoff's law problems?

Dan M

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/homepage.html