The insights by Lauren Aguilar, Greg Walton, and Carl Wieman on how students perceive their classroom experience and on suggested interventions for improving physics teaching are indeed helpful in elementary and perhaps middle schools. By the time students reach high school and college levels, however, it is too late. Many students in my college freshman general-education physics course do not understand the concepts of multiplication and division and often mix them up even in obvious situations. Students with an unacceptably weak background in mathematics can require months of intervention to correct just the arithmetic difficulties—something that should have been done in elementary school and is clearly impossible in a one-semester university physics course.
What struck me most in the Physics Today article was the caption for figure 1 on page 44. The photo was taken at a physics conference and drew attention to the absence of women and minority groups in the picture. What was not visible was that an ethnic head count of the audience in that or any other physics-related conference would reveal that it was mainly foreign physicists, second- or third-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and Asian Americans. So beyond addressing the question of why women and minorities are underrepresented, we have to resolve the issue of the underrepresentation of all non-Jewish, non-Asian Americans.
The current American educational establishment is far more favorable to women and minority groups than was 19th-century Europe, so if Emmy Noether, Marie Curie, and Sofia Kovalevskaya could succeed there and then, any girl or minority should be able to succeed in 21st-century America. In my opinion, the underrepresentation in physics and mathematics is the outcome of the US way of life and its fascination with, and submission to, the youth culture, whose ultimate aspiration is to appear on American Idol or The Voice. That submission already has had a devastating impact on our undergraduate physics and mathematics.
During the unpopular Vietnam War, when the counterculture of the 1960s associated physics with the military–industrial complex, physics lost any trace of popularity among young people, and its affiliation with the difficult subject of mathematics only stoked its unpopularity. To woo young people, some physics educators came up with a way of making the subject “attractive.” Radical conceptualism conquered undergraduate physics pedagogy, and mathematics, which ever since Galileo was the language of physics, was exiled. Equations gave way to colorful cartoons, and the conceptual “physics for …” courses mushroomed throughout the land.
What a far cry from the wisdom of the Committee of Ten, an 1890s group of educators who wanted to standardize the curriculum in US high schools. They wrote, “Every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.”1
The 1960s also saw a dramatic increase in the application of psychology and cognitive science in mathematics and physics with the intention of improving teaching. Almost 30 years later, US 12th graders performed miserably in an international assessment of science and mathematics.2 And almost 50 years later, we are still talking about “psychological insights for improved physics teaching” while the nation receives a failing report card for its 12th-grade performance in mathematics.3
The ultimate question of how students learn physics and mathematics is this: How much time are they willing—or forced—to spend, at an early age, practicing physics and the mathematics that goes with it? It is puzzling that such an obvious fact has eluded physics and mathematics educators for such a long time. After all, isn’t practice how American students master the game of baseball, the piano, and the skills of speaking, reading, and writing? Isn’t that also how Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Singaporean students master physics and mathematics? And isn’t that the way we train our Physics Olympiad finalists (http://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2015/program.cfm), who by the way, are consistently sons and daughters of the segment of the population represented in the article’s photograph?
I hope we don’t change our PhD programs to accommodate women and minorities—or, more broadly, non-Jewish and non-Asian Americans. Let me finish by paraphrasing Euclid’s famous quip when Egyptian ruler Ptolemy I asked him if there was an easier way to learn geometry than by reading The Elements: There is no American road to physics and mathematics.
