Re: How much is too much?

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

Tina Fanetti wrote:
> The students will have each week or so
> 1 lab report (includes prelab)
> 1-2 homework assignments of about 10 problems.
> They will have a term paper of about 10 pages.
>
> ... some shorter papers of about 1-2 pages in length.
.....
> Does this seem like too much work?

The question is unanswerable because it is underspecified.

In particular:
> 1-2 homework assignments of about 10 problems

In increasing order of importance:

A) Is it 1 or is it 2?  Factors of two are significant.

B) Even more importantly, it depends on what the 10
problems are like.  It is trivial to come up with
10 problems, each of which will take an entire day
to solve, even for someone who understands the material.
The trick is to come up with 10 problems that students
can solve in a reasonable amount of time if (and only
if) they understand the material.

C) Much more importantly, you need to account for the
time it takes to understand the material.  This requires
reading and thinking and discussing it outside of class.
Homework is _partly_ excercise, i.e. practice in solving
problems, but also it is partly a diagnostic, letting
the students (immediately) and you (a couple days later)
know whether they are getting the message.  The rule is,
a student who can't see how to do the homework problems,
study the text and the handouts and discuss with fellow
students until the ideas fall into place.  Far too many
students equate homework with homework-problems, but in
fact homework includes working at home in other ways.
This generalized studying _should_ be the _largest_
single item in the time budget, but it wasn't mentioned
in the original list.

D) Ignore all the previous items.  Here is the only one
that really matters:  The amount of work assigned is only
distantly related to the amount of work that the students
actually do.  The real issue is motivation.  If they are
not motivated, they won't do the work, no matter how much
or how little you assign.

It is crucial to find out where the students are coming
from, and where they are going to .... i.e. why they
are taking the course and what they want to get out of
it.  Are these physics majors?  Engineering majors?  Do
they want to get jobs in the biotech sector?  Are they
planning on careers in the fast-food industry?

There are some students who do _not_ have any good reason
to take a calc-based physics course.  They should drop
the course, the sooner the better.  Having them in the
class is a lose/lose/lose situation for them, for you,
and for the rest of the class.

But you should be able to "sell" the idea of a physics
class to most students.  It won't sell itself;  you have
to overtly and methodically sell it.  Here are some of
the ideas that might find their way into such a sales
pitch:

For starters, physics teaches people how to think.  People
who trained as physicists have gone on to make epochal
contributions to biology, computer science, economics, and
practically every other field you can name.

I remember taking first-semester physics.  One of my
classmates remarked that learning about harmonic
oscillators was about as exciting as learning how to
boil water.  Eventually he realized that half the
stuff he cared about was either a harmonic oscillator
or a wave, and that understanding the harmonic oscillator
equation was a prerequisite to understanding the wave
equation.

A lot of the stuff in first-semester physics is so
simplified that it _appears_ to have lost connection with
reality: discrete masses on discrete springs, massless
ropes on frictionless pulleys, et cetera.  You, the
teacher, have to convince the students that there is
a connection.
 -- The receptor cells in your inner ear are (slightly
   complicated) harmonic oscillators.
 -- The electromagnetic field is a bunch of harmonic oscillators.
 -- Anyone who wants to understand the hog cycle had better
   start with harmonic oscillators.
 -- The top speed of light aircraft is often limited by
   the onset of flutter, which is (among other things) a
   harmonic oscillator problem.
 -- etc. etc. etc.

I repeat:  you should be able to "sell" the idea of a physics
class to most students.  It won't sell itself;  you have
to overtly and methodically sell it.

You also need to tell 'em what your role is.  Presumably
they want to learn the material;  if not, they should drop
the course.  Your job, then, is to help 'em learn it as
quickly and easily as possible.  The homework problems are
not assigned in order to make their life more problematical,
but rather to make their life easier by pacing them through
a multi-step process that would be intimidating and daunting
in the absence of such pacing.