Ed Schweber (edschweb@ix.netcom.com)
Physics Teacher at The Solomon Schechter Day School, West Orange, NJ
Hi:
Brian McInnes asks in regard to my previous most about how much subtlety
a high school student can reasonably grasp (in regard to the ongoing thread
about the work done or not done by friction):
> Is the problem with the student or with OUR understanding
>and fixed ideas? Are we set in our ways of building up a
>model for mechanics because that is the way we have always
>thought of it and that is the way that so many of the traditional
>texts treat it?
Yes, sometimes physics education is simply passed down unthinkingly
from generation to generation. Our students must endure it because we did.
Why else - a hundred years after the electron was discovered - do we still
use conventional currents?
However, in this case, to come up with a second definition of quasi work
would, I think, confuse even the best high school students.