How can physics and calculus be effectively taught together?

[DavidWhitbeck]

I have found that lecture shouldn't dominate class time, but it's still important and needs to be there. Fifteen minutes for a subject can be enough if you force the students to study the book on their own. But if you don't do any lecture, they will just not learn it at all. I know this from personal experience. Lecture in moderation, especially in conjunction with examples and demos, is an invaluable learning tool in the classroom.

 

[DeanBH]

lectures, and hard open questions that gets people involved and thinking IMO.

 

[DavidWhitbeck]

lectures, and hard open questions that gets people involved and thinking IMO.

I agree with that. Simple problems teach students to just be formula seekers and not really how to solve problems. Challenging problems that require interpretation and deep thinking, force students to develop good problem solving skills. I really like Maryland's context rich problems and their guidelines for creating them.

My approach next year in teaching physics will be--

conceptual only, worksheets and questions but not problem solving-- first pass through the material

ALPS kits-- on the second pass through the material, show them how to solve problems by practicing each step in isolation (especially constructing pictorial representations of the problem)

Problem solving-- on the third and final pass through the material, have them use the concepts and the methodology they learned before to practice solving difficult problems.

 

[lulz]

physics shud not be speld fizix.

to me this does not provoke a desire to respond.

appropriate language is a good beginning for all scientific discussion.

Just wondering: why don't you capitalize your sentences? Is it because a sentence is more symmetrical when everything is lowercase, i.e. it looks nicer?

I'm not trying to be a prick, just genuinely curious.

 

[FrogPad]

Is it really necessary to have lectures at all? From my experience almost no learning takes place during lectures, so why not get rid of them? You just hand out lecture notes, and have problem sessions were student can ask and discuss problems. This should also be done in high school.

Instead of the lectures you could let the students watch videos about interesting physics topics. That would be much more fun for the students. The students would then also have more energy left after school to do some serious hard work on their physics problems.

Man, you must have never had a great professor that just blew your mind. Listen to Feynman sometime... would you get rid of that?

 

[vanesch]

I agree with what you said about how we learn and how the general student learns. I disagree with the jumping around strategy. Arons ("Teaching Introductory Physics") and Knight ("Five Easy Lessons") say that physics education research has found that the learning process that starts concrete and gradually abstracts the theory is the most successful.

I don't want to give the wrong impression that one day, one should talk about hilbert spaces, and the next day, one should show pulleys. Of course there has to be a building-up of the material. I was talking about the didactic techniques. Sometimes you can give a lecture which gives you a general treatment (that's "abstract", to pleas the intellectual profiles), say, define Newton's law and so on, and sometimes you can give a very concrete set of examples, from real life (to please the practical constructivists). Sometimes you can give individual reading assignments, and sometimes you can hand out tasks to be done in small working groups (that's the social interaction part, in the constructionist style) - I wasn't talking about social interaction in the "let's have a beer together" style! Different student profiles will have different "learning efficiencies" for the different activities, but by introducing some variability, you can preferentially reach different parts of the class "efficiently".
Sometimes you can have them do presentations (to please the "I want to be successfull" types) and sometimes you want them to be a bit more passively acquire the material.

I agree that there should be a diversity of activities, I'm just saying that there is a preferred teaching direction that will help the most students and it's not random.

Of course, sorry if I implied that. I was talking about the techniques, not the material itself.

 

[terminator88]

I am curious too about something.

physics shud not be speld fizix.

to me this does not provoke a desire to respond.

appropriate language is a good beginning for all scientific discussion.

Where did he see fizix?

I go to a very very messed up school.Its tough and demanding but I feel like I don't learn much there(I cud write a whole essay on this).
Anyways I want knw how shud physics be taught in high school just out of curiousity?
Because in grade 12 I absolutely hated the our core physics course...all we did was memorise formulas and apply them on specific situations(similar to the AP physics B course..I think).In grade 11 I liked a little bit of the theory but then again there was soo much memorising specific things(E.g:Whether a Virtual or real image is formed by a camera?)which just bored me to death.

But then I took the AP C:E&M course (which was mostly self-study as my teacher sux) and it was very interesting and satisfying to learn on my own.So is physics really taught like the way in my school or is it different for u people out there and kept interesting at the same time?

 

[Count Iblis]

Man, you must have never had a great professor that just blew your mind. Listen to Feynman sometime... would you get rid of that?

We should give all lectures like that. But that's not going to happen. So, you would then be beter off by showing a video of Feynman lecturing instead of lecturing yourself. But then you could just as well turn all your lectures into video sessions. Sometimes a lecture by e.g. Feynman, sometimes a documentary etc. etc.

You then save a lot of time that you can put to better use by writing good lecture notes and thinking of problems for the problems sessions.

 

[Count Iblis]

I am curious too about something.

Where did he see fizix?

Actually writing fizix is no problem whatsoever as most brains are able to interpret it correctly. It is amazing how the brain can do this. You can even take some text (spelled correctly), and then randomly permute the letters in all the words except the first and last letters and most of the text will still be readable. The strange thing is that the text is then better readable if you try to read in "fast reading mode". If you try to read it slowly, word for word, it is quite a bit harder to read. I've just done this for one paragraph written by someone in this thread. Just try to see if you can read this:

In many caess, fhasemrn pshycis and fsrahmen cclaulus are eetepcxd to be tkaen in pealarll. Framhesn phcyiss is aslo neisaclsrey aseibsclce to ppleoe oudtise the pciyhss drtaepmnet as mnay prorgams wlil rqrieue taking at lsaet prat of taht snuecqee; tihs asdie from sttdunes who are tikang it to filufll gaernel eioctudan renqutemries. Tuhs you get this ruslet. On top of tihs, msot pchisys depmntaerts seem to aarldey be sutck fniootg two incsnaets of tihs sieres - the "for sitesncits / mojars" ianstcne is adraley cucualls bsead to a dreege. Waht tihs raelly menas is taht it uess a very samll aomunt vrey late in, wilhe rnyielg lealrgy on tegionorrtmy and albegra. The ohetr vsrioen is ostueatltsoiny alebrga-bsead, but in trun deson't use that nrelay as mcuh as it cuold be.