Woopydalan said:
Unless I'm asked to derive an equation on the test, I feel it is a waste of lecture time, especially if the textbook will take the ink to do the same thing. It's mostly algebra manipulation anyway. It goes away from the meat and potatoes of physics in my opinion.
I'm not saying you need to shoot guns in class to prove your point like lewin did, so I guess your opinion is that CC professors ought to be lower quality than what you get at MIT?
Your forgetting CC has lost funding (atleast in CA), so you might only have 1 or 2 professors for a certain subject, and the other professor will be at the same time as your math class or whatever.
The point I wanted to make here was that I think educators should lecture what they know they are going to put on the exam, or atleast things of similar nature, atleast get the blood flowing to think like a problem solver. Don't waste my time deriving equations if the test is going to have problems in them that involve analyzing situations and applying the equations to the situations.
It adds insult to injury when the professors do this on purpose as a ploy to weed people out, I didn't know there was so much ego in science until I started to immerse myself in it, which was only about a year ago.
The thing is, you are in a science course. Not an engineering or history course.
In a philosophy class, you would have similar. They would cover the concepts and ideas of a major philosophy, then on a test would have you write an essay translating a scenario in the context of the philosophical stance. This scenario would never have appeared in class, you would be expected to apply the philosophy to show that you understand it, not just spout off dates of birth/death/publication for the major followers of the belief.
In Science, the teacher spends time deriving an equation to help show you what the pieces mean, so that you can extrapolate a universal application from the problems in your homework.
Homework problems will typically deal with a single variable being absent and solved for, or optimized, or being adjusted and observed. A few problems per assignment should integrate multiple equations at once.
Test questions ought to require application of multiple equations, but each application be relatively simple, or require multiple steps of application of a single equation/technique. These kinds of questions will show understanding of the material, and should be possible if you were learning concepts, instead of memorizing facts.
It is roughly equivalent to learning sentence structure in English, then being asked to write a proper paragraph. You are doing synthesis, instead of regurgitation.
As for you wanting to be asked to derive equations on the exam: Unless you want to be spitting back out the exact steps he had done on the board (raw memorization), you are asking to be given a task of deriving a completely new equation, based on learning the techniques of derivation during observation in lecture. And THAT is something which is very far beyond what you ever want to be asked to do. Especially with a time limit.
And of course if you DO just want to spit back what you saw on the board, you would suddenly find that many of the "small steps" which you ignore during class because they seem pointless are absolutely vital to avoid ambiguity, and omission of them can cost you almost all points for the problem. Or that the professor provided some steps verbally only, due to complication of being unable to present it in a linear manner (or need to use calculus beyond what is a prereq for the class), and you forgot about them... so again miss a vital point and fail to answer properly. Yes, when the professor is doing a derivation in front of the class things are simple and it is a yawn fest. But the moment you have to sit down and do it for yourself, you'll realize how many thousands of possible directions you can go at each point. (I will assume at this point you have learned the equation for the period of a pendulum. If so, stop right now and attempt to derive it from just F=ma and a free body diagram)
Of course, all of this is just my own views on instruction. Each instructor has their own preferences, but they will be flavored by the field they are in, and what they have seen before (which compounds the flavoring by field, since a teacher will have mostly seen previous material from their own field). And in Physics, the primary interest is in scientific thought and processing. Memorization in physics is not just devalued, but in some cases almost considered a handicap (many things you learn in lower level classes are just approximations. Very good ones, but if you want precision, you have to abandon them as incorrect. Though when you don't need precision and want speed or easy to follow steps, then you have to re-accept them as valid...)
To get back to answering just your original post though so this doesn't just sound like I am saying "you are wrong" I will clarify that it is less an issue of the professor giving you as little information as possible, and more an issue of the professor speaking a different language than you do. In the professor's mind, if you see where the equation comes from, how each piece works, then you can apply it anywhere. For you, maybe you need to see the equation applied in numerous locations and different manners, then you'll begin to understand where the equation comes from and how the pieces work. You both approach the knowledge along the same paths, but from opposite ends.
