In his 6/5/01 Phys-L post "Re: Defining Student Success," John Denker wrote:
"I work with a whole department full of people who are highly
internally motivated. AFAICT, they have never followed a rule or
jumped through a hoop in their life."
As a connoisseur of acronmys and former chair of the Indiana
University Physics Department's key "ACROC" ("ACRonym Committee,
pronounced "A Crock"), I was crushed to finally meet an acronym I
didn't know.
Typing "AFAICT" into the "Search for" slot of the Phys-L archives
<http://mailgate.nau.edu/archives/phys-l.html> yielded 18 hits, but a
similar search at PhysLrnR, Physhare, Biopi-L, POD, STLHE-L, and
Math-Teach gave 0 hits.
Lest anyone think that Phys-L subscribers are acroronymically ahead,
all 18 Phys-L hits are either posts by Denker or by people quoting
Denker (except for one post by Dave Bowman).
Then Google <http://www.google.com/> came to my rescue with 7290 hits
in 0.17 seconds, and informed me that "AFAICT" stands for "As Far As
I Can Tell." Well, it certainly should have been obvious!
But turning to more substantive matters, AFAICT, the definitive word
on student success came form Voltaire:
"TO SUCCEED IN THE WORLD IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO BE STUPID, YOU MUST ALSO
BE WELL MANNERED."
So aside from essential training in etiquette (Tuckerman, 1995) and
acronyms (Bonk & Dear 2000), standard rote-learning physics courses
should insure success.
Does anyone doubt that rote learning induces stupidity? As indicated
in Mahajan and Hake (2000), according to Schoenfeld (1989), Raditz
inserted, into sets of problems worked by school children, total
NON-problems such as (in its entirety!):
"Mr. Lorenz and 3 colleagues started at Bielefeld at 9 a.m. and drove
the 360 km to Frankfurt, with a rest stop of 30 minutes."
Raditz reported that the percentage of students who "answer" such
non-problems INCREASES CONSISTENTLY FROM KINDERGARTEN THROUGH 6TH
GRADE.
This evidence strongly suggests that the more time students spend in
rote "learning," the more brain-dead they become.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Richard Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
Mahajan, S. & R.R.Hake. (2000). "Is it finally time for a physics
counterpart of the Benezet/Berman math experiment of the 1930's?"
PERC 2000 "Physics Education Research Conference: Teacher Education";
online at <http://wol.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/>.
Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1989). Teaching mathematical thinking and
problem solving. In Toward the thinking curriculum: Current cognitive
research, Lauren B. Resnick and Leonard B. Klopfer, eds. (Alexandria,
VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development).
Tuckerman, N, N. Dunnan, J. Aher, A. Vanderbilt. (1995). The Amy
Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette (Doubleday).