Effective approaches to physics education

[physical_eric]

My professor and I were talking today and he was suggesting that most physics texts are laden with math that is sometime unrelated to the problems at hand. His specific example was a question that asked the student to find the electromagnetic field at x if the field increases by a given exponential function. He asserted that electromagnetic fields increase linearly or like a sin wave (I might not be quoting him completely correctly, but that isn't the point), and that this problem doesn't give the student a real understanding of the phenomenon.
The lab I have with him is a lot of hands on with the student figuring out how the principles work and using them to find out what they need to know.

Are there any good textbooks that provide more than mathematical exercises and walk the student through a process that will end with a familiar and useful understanding of the material?
We are mostly talking about introductory physics, what are some alternative approaches that have been effective?

I have also heard many students argue that they get bogged down in the mathematical arguments of quantum that they don't understand it.

His main complaint is that a lot of time he receives graduate student who don't know what he expects them to and it is because they aren't being properly educated.

thanks.

 

[jasonRF]

My professor and I were talking today and he was suggesting that most physics texts are laden with math that is sometime unrelated to the problems at hand. His specific example was a question that asked the student to find the electromagnetic field at x if the field increases by a given exponential function. He asserted that electromagnetic fields increase linearly or like a sin wave (I might not be quoting him completely correctly, but that isn't the point), and that this problem doesn't give the student a real understanding of the phenomenon.
The lab I have with him is a lot of hands on with the student figuring out how the principles work and using them to find out what they need to know.

Are there any good textbooks that provide more than mathematical exercises and walk the student through a process that will end with a familiar and useful understanding of the material?
We are mostly talking about introductory physics, what are some alternative approaches that have been effective?

I have also heard many students argue that they get bogged down in the mathematical arguments of quantum that they don't understand it.

His main complaint is that a lot of time he receives graduate student who don't know what he expects them to and it is because they aren't being properly educated.

thanks.

This is a great question that I of course cannot answer. I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud, as sometimes I can do the math without the depth of understanding i would like to have. I did have a professor who was way way way too mathy for the intro physics he taught, and most of the homework was frightening for me, but he assigned questions from "the flying circus of physics" (at least I think that was the name) each week. These required understanding the material - I don't recall needing any equations or even numbers for any of these. Almost totally qualitative requiring true understanding and real-world application of abstract theory. That is one good resource. The book may have solutions - we weren't told the source of the problems until the end of the semester.

I think that quantum mechanics is different from classical physics. Classical can be more easily understood based upon our intuition gleaned from everyday life and some "simple" lab experiments. I do not understand quantum, I must say. It seems like "intuition" is gained by doing a bunch of nasty math for a bunch of problems, until you train your mind to have some somehow expect certain types of results. Yes, there are some "simple" experiments, too, but those baffle me as well. General principles like uncertainty and correspondence help. But still, I will never truly understand it ... Not sure there is a short-cut for this one that bypasses the math. Hopefully those with better quantum understanding than me will chime in.


good luck

jason