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Re: classroom analysis of disasters



At 10:04 -0700 9/18/01, Larry Woolf wrote:

I agree with John that analyzing footage of the disasters is in extremely
bad taste.

One person's good taste is another's bad taste. Whether analyzing the
disaster footage is bad taste depends strongly on context.

Would you analyze the motion of JFK's assassination as an example of
momentum conservation?

In principle, this was done in the investigation that followed his
assassination. I might not go into all the gory details, but isn't it
important that students understand that *everything* is subject tot
he laws of physics? I don't want them going away from my course with
the idea that certain things cannot be analyzed because they are not
subject to the laws of physics.

Would you be willing to take the "60 Minutes" challenge and go on TV to
explain why it is appropriate to analyze the worst disaster in modern
American history as an appropriate exercise for a physics class - within a
week of the actual event?

I don't know about within a week, but I would certainly talk about it
in general in class within a week of the event. Henry Petroski's book
"To Engineer is Human" has been mentioned in this thread before,
IIRC. It is just that, a collection of analyses of disasters. In the
final anaysis, that's how we learn--from our mistakes, and some of
them have pretty awful consequences, but that doesn't mean we get to
ignore the ones with awful consequences (and how awful is too awful,
anyway?).

Would you analyze the motion of people who fell to their deaths as an
example of acceleration due to gravity?

People fall all the time, and we do those analyses all the time. It
is not inappropriate for students to understand that if you are
unfortunate enought to fall from the wrong height, or onto the wrong
surface, the results can be devastating.

This does nothing more than promote the notion that scientists are unfeeling
propeller heads.

On the other hand, if done properly (I'm not advocating making the
classroom look like the blood and gore that one finds in most
computer games that our students are addicted to), it can have
exactly tho opposite effect. It can promote the notion that
scientists are willing to devote every effort to trying to make the
world a safer place by finding out what went wrong in earlier
disasters.

Hugh
--

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

(919) 467-7610

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