Re: College nowadays - What "should" students know?
From: "JACK L. URETSKY (C)1998; HEP DIVISION, ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB ARGONNE, IL 60439" <JLU@HEP.ANL.GOV>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 10:09:55 -0500
Hi all-
I'm told this is the way it is (or was) done in Australia.
Hugh Haskell wrote, in part:
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And in the best of all possible worlds, wouldn't it be lovely if all
students could be expected to leave high school with approximately
the same level of understanding of physics, having been taught the
subject much like math is taught in our pre-college
environment--start at the fourth or fifth grade with material that is
appropriate to the fourth or fifth grade, and every year after that,
add to that material, and give the students some experience with
suitable lab activities and experience at working with their hands,
so that when they get to physics in high school, they can be taught
material that is appropriate for high school, rather than for middle
school as it now is, because we have to reteach much of what was done
wrong earlier. Then college courses could start assuming that the
students knew certain aspects of physics and could get into the more
interesting and challenging stuff early on.
*********************
Regards,
Jack
"I scored the next great triumph for science myself,
to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us
had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had
followed the cows around for years - that is, in the
daytime - but had never caught them drinking fluid of
that color."
Mark Twain, Extract from Eve's
Autobiography