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Remind me again as to why we are bothering to teach abstract concepts to
concrete thinkers in the first place. Isn't it like reading poetry to your
cat?
Oops, now I remember. That's what we fake doing so we can make a living!
Bob at PC
Of course by definition energy is not a fluid, but the idea of
transference
is deeply imbedded in the human way of thinking. It is a learned idea as
Piaget so aptly showed. At certain levels of development children do not
understand it. When understanding does happen, it is initially only for
concrete objects. Now energy has a big problem, in that it is not a
concrete object, and can not be seen. Anton Lawson has shown that
concepts
which involve unseeable objects are much harder for students to understand
and he has even demonstrated that there may be a level of thinking,
theoretical, above formal operational where students can more easily
understand unseeable concepts. This includes things like evolution, and
most physics concepts. Only a small fraction (<20%) of graduating college
seniors test at this higher theoretical level.
So teaching energy is much easier when it can be made more concrete by
using
a model that it behaves like a fluid in that it can be transferred.
However
when doing this, one must always put in front of the students that this is
just a way of visualizing it, or is an analogy. The need for analogy and
it
uses has been explored by John J. Clement and U.Mass Amherst in a number
of
papers in JRST. The purely abstract arguments based on working are very
weak for most HS and college students.
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