I'm actually exactly in your position, teaching out of Griffiths for the
first time after about 15 years. I am also committing pedagogical
malpractice by being forced to teach the course long distance to two
sites at sister institutions simultaneous with my local institution site
(over a state TV style system, the remote students do have mikes that
allow some communication during class periods), but little of that
actually happens. HW is mailed back and forth. The problem of students
engaging themselves with the course is about an order of magnitude
larger for the remote site students compared to what you describe; I am
a disembodied talking-head for them. It even hurts the engagement of
the local group of students, but not as badly.
Part of the problem is the natural tendency of students to look for
short-cuts. The easy availability of solution manuals nowadays through
the "catalyst" of the internet, makes doing this easier than ever and
almost irresistible to students.
Some partial solutions:
A)Choose an unpopular book for which solutions may not be out there. I
chose against this as I feel that Griffiths is such a well written book;
that I wanted my students to use it. I.e. the down side of this
solution is that the book may be unpopular for a reason.
B) Another would be to no have a text, and only use lecture notes and
your own written problems. Downside is naturally that student notes
aren't always the greatest thing, your lecture notes may not be as well.
Plus you have to spend lots of time writing problems (even if you steal
them from other sources)
B)"Ignore" the problem, i.e. the I can't stop it, but you need to be
able to know the material on exams solution. I'm partially doing this
and it sounds like you are to.
One could approach this several ways, one being assign HW but don't
grade it. This would make the course closer to the old English style of
instruction, where you put a lot of the onus of learning the material on
the students, where the "stick" is that they have to learn the material
well enough to pass the exams. Unfortunately, this style has some major
drawbacks in the current American University culture. The threat of not
passing the course would have to be creditable; would your dept. head
and Dean back you up?; not likely for most; here John D's suggestion
about talking to your department head prior to a disgruntled student
approaching her is a good suggestion. Also, students are so inculcated
with the idea of getting points for HW, that it has become almost
necessity to do so as a motivator to get them to look at that material.
This is not entirely the student's fault. They have other courses as
well that require doing HW for percentages of those grades, so if you
don't allocate points for the HW, where will they spend their
non-leisure time?
Another approach, which I am using in both my introductory course and to
a lesser extent in my Griffith's course is to write up your own HW
problems. So far this appears to help the problem. Since my source of
problems (mostly I steal them from other sources) aren't labeled as to
where they come from; there appears to be enough "activation energy"
required to prevent trying to look up solutions. I've only done this
for about 1 in 8 problems in my Griffith's class so far. I've also
down-graded the percentage of course points available from HW in my
intro class. (Not yet for the advanced class). The major down-side is
the extra time it requires of me to do this. Ideally, I'd use all my
"own" problems, but their simply isn't enough time to do so; and I must
spend more time on my courses than I used to spend. Other good
suggestions that have been made here also have that down-side. (more
late nights and weekend work)
What you have noticed is a problem, and seriously degrades the use of HW
as a learning tool. Unfortunately it is a fact of life, and I think
constitutes the new reality. A major problem is that the better fixes
aren't panaceas and seem to imply a lot more time on the instructors
part, and I have seen no commensurate willingness on the part of my boss
and his/her boss to decrease the number of courses I have to teach in
order to facilitate these solutions.
__________________
On a side note, I found as you apparently are finding, that my foreign
students tend to be willing to be engaged and assume that responsibility
more readily. About 10-12 years ago we had a large number (for us) of
chinese students in our program (a modest MS program), who generally
were quite good and responsible; after about 4 years or so, I found that
instead of being uniformly good that there was a disturbing tendency for
some of them to have developed "American" learning habits after being
here for about a year.
Joel R.
| -----Original Message-----
| From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
| [mailto:phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] On Behalf
| Of Monce, Michael N.
| Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 7:26 AM
| To: Forum for Physics Educators
| Subject: [Phys-l] not our majors now!
|
|
|
| My colleagues in the department are tired of hearing me
| complain so I'm taking this to a higher authority: PHYS-L. :-)
|
| I'm teaching E&M to a class of 8 majors. I'm using Griffiths
| as I've done for over many years, and actually think I'm
| doing a better job in teaching the course than ever (practice
| makes perfect). I think the "disease" that seems to be
| infecting the general student population has made its way
| into our majors. The students are not engaging the material;
| i.e. they are not putting in the work to stay up with the
| course and often wait until the last night to start the
| problem assignment. They don't seem to have a grasp of even
| basic concepts from the intro. course. I gave a pop quiz to
| confirm my suspicions which consisted of intro course level
| problems and except for 2 students, the other 6 failed. I've
| talked to them about keeping up, how this is a challenging
| course for majors, etc. etc. etc. The worst of it is for the
| "6" their problem sets are near perfect and closely resemble
| Griffiths' solution manual, yet when I ask them basic
| question in class, none can come up with the answers. I've
| told them that I can't stop them from using such a manual,
| but it will do them no good on the exams, and will probably
| contribute to their failure if they are not truly trying to
| work on the material. I've never expected this from junior
| level physics majors. GE students in an intro course, yes,
| but not here. I've taught this course probably 15 times and
| this is the first instance that I've seen such a lack of
| effort on the part of the students. Oh, by the way, the 2 who
| seem to be keeping up are both foreign students, the "6" are American.
|
| Rant off. Any ideas folks?
|
|
| Mike Monce
| Connecticut College
|