Re: College nowadays - What "should" students know?

[Joseph Bellina <jbellina@SAINTMARYS.EDU>]

This is an interesting conversation for me because a similar thing is
happening at the college level.  The med schools seem to be concerned
that physics courses are getting watered down, so they are apparently
now asking for calculus based physics instead of algebra based.  Many of
the life science students here don't have the background, and symbolic
manipulation skills to do a good calc based course.  If I spend time
developing the calculus, I cannot do the more important issues like
helping them understand physics.  Seems counterproductive to me...unless
of course they are just asking us to be a filter.

cheers

joe

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Ed
Schweber wrote:

> Ed Schweber (edschweb@ix.netcom.com)
> Fran Poodry criticizes me for saying
>
>    "I have become increasingly troubled that "good" high school
>      physics classes are increasingly becoming mirrors of college
>     classes. Only if we high school teachers run through Serway and
>     Faughn, Giancoli, Cutnell and Johnson, etc are we deemed to
>     be doing our jobs."
>
>    Obviously I am talking about trends and not specific teachers.
>
>     But many HS courses (even those that are not A.P.) use college textbooks
> and strive to cover a large chunk of them. What else are they doing besides
> mirroring college courses?
>
>     The problem is not with what college professors want but with what
> college admissions commitees want. Students perceive - I believe correctly
> so - that having a number of AP classes helps get them into selective
> colleges. Therefore, a college level class has become the criterion of a
> good high school course even if something else would be better for the
> students' intellectual development.
>
>     And of course, high schools compete among themselves on the basis of how
> many students get high AP scores. Here in New Jeresey, where Fran and I both
> teach, New Jersey Monthly magazine periodically gives numerical rankings to
> public schools with the number of AP classes offered being one of their
> criteria.
>
>    And when the book came out last year ( I forget it's exact title - but it
> had the word "class" in it, punning on school and social class) with the
> list of the top hundred schools nation wide in terms of how many students
> took AP exams - how many of us on this list didn't run out to get it?
>
>  I once had an interview at a New Jersey public school where the pincipal
> told me he was looking for a teacher to cover both the mechanics and E&M
> AP-C syllabus to students whom he called unmotivated on their first exposure
> to physics.
>
>     My point was that fewer topics in more depth seems to be the better
> approach and it does seem to increasingly be what college teachers want -
> which is why I referred to  Sadler(? ) and Mazur.
> I still teach topics at AP depth or greater, but I don't push to cover
> everything. I like the AP test questions but was finding too many students
> who could get the questions right but who did not understand the material to
> my satisfaction.
>
>    And for the record - some of my students still do take the AP -B exam
> after some self study of topics I omitted - and typically get 4's and 5's.
>
> Ed Schweber