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[Phys-L] Re: First Day Activities or Demos



----- Original Message -----
From: "jbellina" <jbellina@SAINTMARYS.EDU>
To: <PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: First Day Activities or Demos


Sorry about the outburst...sometimes things get under my skin.

We all have those days ;-)

I wonder about the oft spoken claim on this list that we learned from
lectures. Have any of us really teased out what we did when we
listened to lectures. What else did we do, when and how did the
learning occur. I'm not thinking so much in terms of upper division
courses where we were already part of the culture, but rather of
beginning courses, and for each of us the beginning might be in a
different place.

Just a question.

Obviously I can only speak for myself, and it was a LONG time ago! I've
always had a knack for visualization in three dimensions, so I recall
building mental images of what was being explained so I could mentally
manipulate them. I often confound my classes by saying that "this angle is
equal to that angle over there", and when they ask me how I know that, I say
someting like, "well if you take this line here and rotate it, both those
angles increase from 0 to 90 degrees in size at the same time - They have to
be equal". Some of them get what I'm saying, but most of them have no idea
what I did, and it's hard for me to explain. It's just something that comes
naturally to me.

One of the best examples of this from high school was coming up with a
prediction and explanation of the Doppler Effect before it was formally
presented in class. The instructor asked what would happen to sound if a
source was moving toward us. I could "see" the wavefronts piling up in
front of the moving source, and with a shorter wavelength, the frequency of
arrival had to be higher so.. I was also blessed with very good recall, so
I could remember most of what I saw or heard. The key, however, was not so
much what the teacher said or did as much as what I was doing mentally with
it.