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Re: piles of stones (was derivations)

John Barrere commented:

True, not as much is "covered" via Modeling, but
Webster defines cover "to hide or obscure from view".
Is anything useful (other than "passing" an
end-of-course exam) accomplished by teaching students
to work textbook problems by plugging into equations?
When second-year HS (ie, AP) students score 35% or
less on the FCI, the answer is obvious.

Point well taken, John. There is always this problem of "breadth vs.
depth" when we teach physics. What the tragedy is, is that we all
seem to be in a position that we have to start over every year--only
a small minority of any of our students (and this seems to extend
from middle school to college freshmen and sophomores, and further
when we deal with education majors) have ever had any physics before.
What do we do with them? Do we try to teach them all how to be
physicists, even though we know that very few will be? Do we try to
give them some idea of the scope and beauty of physics? Usually, we
try to do both, often with predictable results.

In the best of all possible worlds, we would have some sort of
national consensus of a physics curriculum starting in, say, fifth
grade, so that by the time we got to 10th, 11th or 12th grade, we
could expect our students to have some understanding of the
underlying concepts that we would like to build our structure on
(size, density, maybe force, what a basic electric circuit is,
perhaps a conservation law or two--that kind of stuff), so that we
could use some of the neat new concepts that PER is coming up with to
achieve some appreciation for the ideas of physics, and then leave
our students ready to take on more when they get to college, not just
rehash the same old stuff.

BTW, John. Welcome to the neighborhood. Give me a call sometime when
the mood strikes you and perhaps we can hoist a cool one or two.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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