Teaching teachers and reaching students

Kleppner replies: I greatly admire Andrew Mugler’s efforts to foster science instruction in disadvantaged public schools, surely one of the toughest challenges a science teacher can face. However, he slightly misconstrues the goal of TOPS. Its primary goal is to encourage undergraduate physics majors to pursue careers in pre-college teaching. Teaching teachers to teach requires students to be taught, and to provide those we organized the TOPS high-school physics workshop. Although the workshop provides an enriching experience for its high-school participants, its rationale is to provide an enriching teaching experience for our TOPS undergraduates.