I mostly agree with Larry Cartwright, but I would like to add my own
personal spin to it.
First a synopsis, forgive me if I've shortened this paragraph too much.
Yes we want students to come out of high school with a love of science
and an appreciation of its beauty. And yes, as Larry points out, many
college profs also have their list of "must cover" topics.
My spin is this: I do not care as much about what items are on the
list as much as I care that there are some items on the list that
require the student to realize that, (1) physics requires working
through theories and equations on paper, (2) doing this requires math,
(3) doing this often requires plain old hard work (not the
ditch-digging kind of work, but the beat your head against the wall
kind of hard work). Students need to appreciate that becoming a
physicist will require that they spend more time doing this hard stuff
than the time they will spend doing "fun activities."
Over and over a struggling student says to me something like this. "I
loved physics in high school. We dropped eggs, we built bridges, we
launched rockets, we did all sorts of cool things. I really thought
physics was the vocation for me. But now I'm in college and we don't
do any of those cool things. We just study equations, and we do boring
labs that need to analyzed in excruciating detail. This isn't fun."
Well, just like beauty, fun is in the eye of the beholder. Yes it's
hard to beat the excitement of seeing your bridge hold 30 pounds
without breaking. But if you cannot resolve the vector forces in the
trusses and on the joints and understand
the strengths and weakness, and what you might do to improve it, then
you've only done a small part of the physics. If you only perceive the
building and testing as fun, or worse, you find the analysis boring or
impossible, physics is probably not going to be your vocation.
In my sophomore calculus-based physics course, I have one year to get
the students through a book like Halliday & Resnick, (or Tipler, Sears
& Zemansky, etc.). There isn't time for a lot of "fun" activities.
(We do have a science club for those kinds of things.) I personally
think the labs I have the students do are fun. But many students do
not agree, especially compared to dropping eggs. Taking data from an
air track and writing a formal lab report is pure drudgery to the same
students who thought high school physics was "a fun course."
I need to be careful at this point because I do not want to sound too
condescending on high school teachers. And I understand the desire to
be a popular teacher, and to have more than two students in the class,
and to have students excited. However, if the end result of a high
school physics class is that a student chooses to major in physics,
only to get to college and find out the "real physics" is nothing like
what they thought it was, then I would have to say that the high-school
program did a disservice to that student.
So please continue to have fun... but also make it clear that hard work
is involved, and do that by requiring that the students actually do
some of the hard work. Don't disillusion them. (I think I created a
new verb there... but you get the point.) If they come to college with
a realistic view of what physics is like (because they've don't it)
then I am not going to worry as much about whether they covered this
specific topic or that specific topic. I think I am pretty safe in
saying that because if they have truly gone into anything with
sufficient detail to appreciate what the real physics is like, then
they must have covered "the basics" as a prerequisite to that (whatever
those "basics" are).
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817