Recently a comedian in a comedy club in New York asked me if I was a professor. I said, “Yes, a professor of physics.” “Physics!” he said. “I was in a bookstore and saw a book, Physics for Dummies. I opened it and it said, ‘You'd better cheat.’” Physics has that reputation, as all of us in the field know, and yet I'm not sure if we have grappled with the reason why.
REFERENCES
1.
Toni
Feder
, “More physics in U.S. high schools
,” Phys. Today
60
, 32
(March 2007
). Data on introductory college physics are included in the graph.2.
Paul G. Hewitt, Conceptual Physics, 9th ed (Pearson, Addison-Wesley, 2002), p. xx.
3.
In two different courses for education majors taught some years ago, I asked students to study some notes on operations with scientific notation, including illustrative and assigned problems. They learned, largely on their own, to use these techniques quite successfully.
4.
L.C.
McDermott
and E.F.
Redish
, “Resource Letter: PER-1: Physics Education Research
,” Am. J. Phys.
67
, 755
–756
(Sept. 1999
).5.
See, for example, L.C. McDermott and the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Washington, Physics by Inquiry, Vols. I and II (Wiley, 1995).
6.
“Conceptual Physics” as a course for nonscientists is in danger of becoming standardized (fossilized?), just as happened with “Physics 1 and 2” some (perhaps) 75 years ago. In a way my writing this article is an attempt to forestall this standardization and to create some space for discussion. But there are two issues about the course that ought to be debated: (1) How to teach, and (2) what to teach. This article is about (1); the paragraph here footnoted is a stand-in for (2).
7.
Michael
Sobel
, “Teaching thermodynamics and the nature of matter
,” Phys. Teach.
45
, 511
–515
(Nov. 2007
).8.
It seemed it would add excessively to the students' burden to ask them to memorize all the analysis in, say, four or five chapters of the textbook for an hour exam. Instead, I told them that prior to the exam I would select three or four specific derivations, of which one would be on the exam. This way they had to pay attention to what I was doing.
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© 2009 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2009
American Association of Physics Teachers
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