Re: Cause and Effect

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

At 8:45 AM -0600 10/26/00, Dewey Dykstra, Jr. wrote, inter alia:
> Why?  Because the result of this failure on our part goes *far deeper* than
> the students do not develop a new notion of force.  The majority learn from
> this  failure and the many others we inflict on them that they are not
> smart, not good enough, to understand science, physics in particular, and
> certain other special people are.  I know that this outcome is not intended
> by *most* of us, but there it is nonetheless.  (I use "most" here instead
> of "any" in the previous sentence having explicitly thought about the
> choice.)


Dewey, are you suggesting that the majority of your students are
intrinsically capable of understanding physics, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable intellectual facilities,
and that among these is the right to understand Newton's laws *as we
do*?

It has been my experience that many students in the rather select
group of students from high schools that is admitted to our
university, certainly many  fewer than the majority of them, are
incapable, indifferent, or even hostile to learning physics. Only a
select (in most cases self-selected) minority succeed in doing so. I
have certainly had many failures which I can sincerely attribute to
students' intrinsic incapability even when motivation was present.

Perhaps the perception of some students that "they are not smart, not good
enough, to understand science, physics in particular, and certain
other special people are" is accurate. Perhaps these students are
smarter than you think.

We (my wife is a chemist here at SFU) have four brilliant children.
One of them, now a professor in the anthropology department of a
large university, has an excellent international reputation as a
scholar in her field. All four children were raised in roughly the
same environment, and all except she (the other three are male) took
to physics enthusiastically and successfully in high school. Our
daughter is certainly smart enough to have done so, if "smartness" is
meaningfully a scalar quantity. I suggest that it is not "smartness"
we should use as a gauge of ability to learn physics, that many
aspects of the intellects of our students must be considered, and not
least among these is interest. (There was no problem there; our
daughter is certainly interested in physics, but she lacked
sufficient interest to do well in a high school physics course. We
recognized this and did not push her in that direction.)

Lets get over the idea that science, especially physics, is for
everybody (or even the majority) just because we know how wonderful
it really is. Certainly the same could be said for the music of
Mozart, but few among us believe that Mozart is for everybody. The
spectrum of our students' intellects is rich and more diverse than we
can imagine, but if our students were all capable of learning
physics, Eminem would not now be outselling Mozart.

Leigh