Re: Pedagogy

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 14:37 -0400 4/30/04, Bob LaMontagne wrote:
> Most of what I read in Fernanda's diatribe was a
> regurgitation of the nonsense promoted by Sheila Tobias in
> her book "They're not dumb, they're different", where she's
> looking for a kindler, gentler physics. Physics is a blood
> sport. It progresses because we all jump on any new idea
> and tear it apart to find flaws. We do it to the ideas of
> the colleagues in out own departments. We do it on lists
> like this. We do it because we want to understand. If you
> don't have that passion, what's the point?
Bob, I have to disagree with your characterization of Sheila Tobias's
work. She was talking about not only physics but chemistry and much
of engineering in "They're Not Dumb" and she wasn't demanding that
students be spoon-fed their "learning," but that they be considered
in the process. There are those of us who survived in physics because
we wanted to, in spite of the attitudes of many of those who "taught"
us. Sheila talks about them, as well. Being a physics teacher (or a
chemistry teacher or a teacher of engineering subjects) does not
require that we be insensitive to the varying needs of the students
who come into our classroom. We have universities, as Fernanda has
realized, so that those who are interested in a subject or group of
subjects can come together and gain some insights from those who have
gone before. In subjects like physics, where the emphasis is on
solving problems, it is important that students be given instruction
in how to do that. It is not innate in most people, and has to be
learned. One way to learn is to solve problems in a supervised
environment. The overwhelming number of people, including scientists
didn't do it all on their own.

Sheila also points out that most students are not just interested in
how to solve this or that problem, but in something we more or less
jokingly call "the big picture." Why are we studying this particular
topic? How is it connected to the rest of the course? How did it
arise in the first place? Where does it fit into my education as a
whole? And other questions of that ilk. Those are important to most
students, at least to those whose interested cover more than a few
narrow topics. Too many courses and too many textbooks are simply
encylopedic presentations of topic after topic with little or no
connection between them. We all know the connections, but the
students often don't, and some are not yet sufficiently sophisticated
to pick up some of the connections on their own. Too much of our
educational system is placed into these hermetically sealed
containers in which the students travel from container to container
without ever realizing that they are all interconnected. How often
have you railed at students who failed to see the connection with
what they were supposed to be learning in their math classes and what
you were presenting in your physics class? Is it unreasonable to be
pointing out these connections? Not just, I might add, to the math
classes, but also to their history, political science and English
classes, and so on.

Can we teach nuclear physics without talking about nuclear weapons?
Can we teach thermodynamics without talking about the environment?
Can we talk about radioactivity without pointing out the mathematical
connection to population? There are literally hundreds of works of
art that are deeply informed by the results of science (by art, I
mean here not just the visual arts but also music and literature). Is
it not worthwhile to bring these connections to the attention of
students? Should we downplay the role of creativity in science, and
turn out a bunch of students (not all of whom will become
professional physicists) who think that there is no creativity to be
found within the halls of science, only "turn the crank and grind out
the problem solutions"?

We often think only about the effects of science on the arts, but it
also works the other way. I recently learned, somewhat to my
astonishment, of the effect that developments in medieval art (here,
painting), had on the contemporary study of optics. I always thought
it to be the other way around. In reality it was a two-way street.
Should we hide these things from our students?

It is this sort of humanistic approach to the teaching of science
that Tobias calls for, and I think she is right. We may not turn many
of the people who take these courses into scientists, but we will
create a much better informed citizenry, and in the final analysis, I
think that is much more important. To do science at the frontier does
require a single-minded approach to the topic at hand, and an
overwhelming urge to "solve the problem," but even those with those
"Nobel" urges are often more broadly based than one might think. Many
scientists are also musicians. Einstein played a passable violin.
Heisenberg and Teller were more or less accomplished pianists.
Borodin, who we remember today as a composer of some grand music,
earned his livelihood as a chemist. Pauling spent many hours working
over the manuscripts of his work for publication, making sure that
they said exactly what he wanted them to say. Do we expect any less
of a novelist? These things are important to students and to people,
and they need to be known. To ignore them dehumanizes science and
leads to the sort of caricatures of scientists that one often sees in
the cinema, and frequently sees on the Saturday morning cartoons that
are presently educating our pre-schoolers, much to the detriment of
our nation and our civilization.

No, Tobias doesn't want us to "dumb down," our science courses, but
humanize them--let the students know why it is important that they
know these things, or at least know of their existence. This can be
done without unnecessary loss of rigor. Not only will it make our
citizenry better informed it will make our science more human.

And it just might keep a few of those first- and second-rank students
from leaving science (with a bad taste in their mouths) for the
humanities, where they can make a career out of trashing science. I
think that's a good thing.

Hugh
--

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

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