Physics in Australia - not quite the full story

[Margaret Mazzolini <mmazzolini@SWIN.EDU.AU>]

> Date:    Fri, 1 Oct 1999 10:09:55 -0500
> From:    "JACK L. URETSKY (C)1998; HEP DIVISION, ARGONNE >NATIONAL
> LAB ARGONNE,
>         IL 60439" <JLU@HEP.ANL.GOV>
> Subject: Re: College nowadays - What "should" students know?
> Hi all-
>       I'm told this is the way it is (or was) done in Australia.
> Hugh Haskell wrote, in part:
I'd love to be able to sit here and thing smugly that we have it right,
however it's not that simple. In theory the description Jack quotes is
roughly correct, though the amount of Physics in each year of the school
syllabus does change somewhat from state to state. However, like lots of
other places, we have a big gap between the theory and what happens in
practice.
In practice relatively few school Physics teachers have studied a great
deal of Physics themselves - they are quite unlikely to be Physics
majors. Therefore they may be quite uncomfortable teaching Physics so
the amount of time they actually devote to it (and their expertise) may
not match the theoretical prescription of what should be done.
The other problem is that, at university level (we don't have US-style
colleges here) Physics is not any more required as a prerequisite for
almost anything. Students can usually complete school then come to
university to study engineering, medicine, and of course science, etc,
without having studied physics in the last 2 years of school - and often
their school careers teachers advise them to do something 'easier'
instead.
So, in practice, the students we teach in the first year of university
may not have done any physics for 2 years, and what they have done may
have been skimpily taught. That's probably not a great deal different to
the US experience, but unfortunately it's not quite the ideal situation
as outlined in Jack's quote. (And I'm not convinced that it was ever
that ideal here in the past, either - the standard may have been uniform
but in those days relatively few students went to university anyway, and
certainly very few girls did physics.)
Cheers
Margaret

--
Dr. Margaret Mazzolini
Astronomy Course Coordinator
Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
BSEE, Mail Box 31,
Swinburne University of Technology,
PO Box 214 Hawthorn VIC 3122
Australia
email: mmazzolini@swin.edu.au
phone: (+61) 3 9214 8084
fax:   (+61) 3 9819 0856

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