Discovering My Child's Lack of Physics Education: A Frustrating Reality

[Andy Resnick]

When people start saying we should teach calculus younger and younger. They overlook that most people simply don't have the intellectual capacity to learn and understand it.

I agree, we should stop pushing calculus earlier and earlier in the curriculum.

There's a vague tension in education, because there's more and more material to master, children are expected to 'grow up' faster and take on more and more responsibilities, yet nobody has figured out how to *learn* faster or more efficiently.

 

[thehacker3]

I agree, we should stop pushing calculus earlier and earlier in the curriculum.

There's a vague tension in education, because there's more and more material to master, children are expected to 'grow up' faster and take on more and more responsibilities, yet nobody has figured out how to *learn* faster or more efficiently.

I, respectfully, disagree. Having taken calculus in high school, I felt that it was a very valuable set of skills to have.

 

[Moonbear]

I, respectfully, disagree. Having taken calculus in high school, I felt that it was a very valuable set of skills to have.

Try telling that to my sister. Seriously.

Calculus in high school was useful for those of us who went on to get further educations in the sciences where we used it extensively. However, we could have also obtained that entirely at the university level. At most, it was a luxury that allowed us to lighten our first year course load by skipping over a few required classes.

On the other hand, neither calculus nor a calculus-based physics course are useful for quite a large part of the population. This is why I mention my sister. She went to college majoring in social work, and currently works as a probation officer. The closest she has ever come to needing physics knowledge might have been when she still worked as a social worker in a shelter for abused women. They had a keen appreciation of the influence of gravity when her former clients did things like jump out of second floor windows to escape their abusive husbands.

Most people can suffice with a conceptual understanding of basic kinematics, such as the need for a longer stopping distance when driving a heavier vehicle at higher speeds, or that if you jump out of the third floor window, it's more likely to hurt you a lot worse than jumping out of a first floor window.

It's been a good 20+ years since I was in high school. From my own experience, I think it would be far better to teach students a conceptual understanding of physics without using calculus rather than the way it was taught when I was in school, which was to use calculus in our physics class the year before we were taught calculus in our math classes. It did make the calculus class easier, but we got very little out of the physics class other than a strong dislike for our teacher.

I think it's great when schools can offer the variety of classes that students who want to go into a variety of majors can get a taste of that coursework before heading off to college, but not all communities have education budgets that make that feasible. In those cases, the priority really shifts to making sure those who are not going to get any further education have the essentials for functioning in society. That starts boiling math lessons down to knowing how to balance a checkbook or stick to a family budget or being smart shoppers able to compare prices on a per unit basis. Science lessons start getting reduced to things like understanding enough biology not to get anyone pregnant until they want to be pregnant and knowing enough about bacteria to avoid contaminating their entire kitchen with E. coli or salmonella, enough chemistry to know not to mix bleach and ammonia when doing that cleaning, or perhaps to keep the more basic things like Draino away from the acidic things when storing them, and not pouring water on a grease fire.

If parents are not satisfied that their kids are learning enough in school, it is up to them to supplement their kids' education as they see fit.

 

[thehacker3]

Well in New York, we had a mandatory Physics Regents class that was pretty easy, and excluded any calculus. It was pure algebra and trigonometry, and was a joke for most students. The ones who wanted to challenge themselves were then given the opportunity to take AP Physics the next year, which was already a calculus based class. Even there, the teacher avoided using calculus because we were taking it simultaneously with the physics class, and did not know anywhere near enough to think of physics from a purely-mathematical point of view.

This had its pros and cons. The pros were that it was incredibly easy to grasp complicated concepts. For example, we used the right-hand-rules to solve 90% of E&M problems asking about vector fields and whatnot.

The cons, as I found out this year, are that this knowledge is severely limited, and I have very limited knowledge about how to solve these problems mathematically.

There were a lot of examples of such simplifications, and they were all valid when taking the AP test. You could, for example, get 10/15 points on any given question by writing an essay on HOW to solve it. You needed 65% of the points to get a "5" on the test, which is a stellar grade.

I think the way things are taught in New York, or at least in my specialized technical high school, are very adequate and appropriate. We were given the most fundamental knowledge of every subject, just to be well-rounded, and if we were interested in a given subject, we were offered an AP class which took things to the next level.