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Re: Pedagogy



We can do without your personal rancor expressed in your other response!
You clearly missed the point. Perhaps 'blood sport' is too harsh a term,
but the fact is that for those training to be physicists, chemists,
biologists, economists, philosophers, doctors, lawyers,..... just about any
profession and most other jobs as well, will find that IT IS A COMPETETIVE
WORLD. If you are going to succeed, you need to have passion for your
chosen field, and that passion will need to help you compete with others who
are vying for the same grants, the same faculty position, the same research
appointment, etc. One way that passion exhibits itself is that YOU need to
take most of the responsibility for your own education. As I've written
before, your instructors are your guides--not you mother!

As to your comment below--it is clear you have little experience in the
classroom as indicated by you characterization of this as a 'simple idea'.
What you describe concerning the Calculus is the rule..not the exception.
Most math courses fail miserably to instill any sense of meaning to
derivatives and integrals beyond 'the slope of the curve' and 'the area
under the curve.' Don't chastise the physics faculty for not succeeding
here--I bet many have tried. I spend an entire year working on the problem
and still find that all but the best students continue to struggle with the
meaning of the integral and the ability to set one up for a physical
situation. My exams don't even ask students to solve the integrals--I know
they can do that (at very least using integral tables)--I only ask that they
setup the integral for a given problem...usually electric fields or
potentials from large charge distributions.

R.W.Tarara

*********************************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
********************************************************
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energy management simulator
SIMLAB-Pendulum lab simulation
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
Energy 2100--class project
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/ENERGY_PROJECT/ENERGY2100.htm
********************************************************

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fernanda Foertter [Advanced Physics Forums]"
<admin@ADVANCEDPHYSICS.ORG>


I've had students that have taken calculus, gotten an A and cant describe
what an integral is, but they know how to solve it. How's that you
figure?
many professors don't bother to explain even simple ideas like this.