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Greetings:
My department (Science department in private high school in suburban
boston) is under substantial pressure to change a title in our
physics
offerings. I am looking for any advice folks on the list might
offer.
We teach four physics courses. Our two introductory courses are
titled
"Conceptual Physics" and "Quantitative Physics." The school's
administration, as the prompting of the College Counciling office,
would
like us to stop using the word "conceptual" because they believe
that it
is equated with "remedial."
Quantitative physics is a trig-based course aimed primarily at
juniors.
"Conceptual Physics" uses Hewitt as a jumping off point, but does
much
more lab investigation, problem solving, and data analysis than you
might
do if you just relied on Hewitt and its supplementary materials.
A colleague and I have worked very hard over eight years developing
the
conceptual curriculum. We teach students who are generally fine at
math,
but who have not yet gotten to the place where math meaningful to
them on
a gut level. They can solve the equations when they sit in math
class, but
I avoid deriving lots of equations with them because they are not
generally convinced by derivations - they're convinced by
experiments. We
tend to stress visual solutions over algebraic ones: for instance,
we work
a lot with graphs when we do kinematics. (Believe it or not, I
haven't
really started kinematics yet this year - we've had a lot of success
with
the sequence: periodic motion - energy - waves - acoustics -
geometric
optics - static E - circuits - kinematics - newton - 2D mo -
momentum)
We try to make this a challenging course for the students who take
it and
one which takes an approach that is dramatically different from the
standard approach we take with the Quant kids. In order to encourage
the
conceptual kids to take the course and themselves seriously we
(perhaps
naively) turned away from the "physics" & "honors physics"
nomenclature.
For my part that was in reaction to other departments I have worked
in
where the emphasis was on sorting wheat from chaff instead of
teaching the
kids you have to love science and do it well.
(I also think it's a little disingenuous to call our conceptual
physics
course just plain "physics." I think it's a great curriculum, but
most
physics teachers who look at 11th grade "physics" think trig-based
and
that's just not what we do in that course.)
My vote is to give the courses arbitrary numbers, say "Physics 103"
and
"Physics 127," but my department chair doesn't seem crazy about
that....
So - under political pressure we seek a pair of course titles that:
(1) hint at "a different path"
(2) make some even weak stab at suggesting how the courses are in
fact
different
(3) do not emphasize the hierarchy (eg physics for smarties/dummies)
I am happy to provide curricular details or debate the pros & cons
of even
teaching such "watered-down" physics with anyone, but I'd especially
appreciate any suggestions for nomenclature.
david
(splash)
____________________
David Strasburger
Physics Teacher • Science Department Technology Coordinator
Noble & Greenough School
10 Campus Drive
Dedham, MA 02026