A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?
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Monday, November 12, 2012
Physics education, again.
This video is great at pointing out much of what is wrong with high school physics education in the US. However, I find the implication that this is not that hard to fix to be a bit tough to swallow. More later....
1 comment:
Anonymous
said...
That video's optimism is not grounded in reality and some of it is plainly inaccurate. Atomic structure and some modern physics is taught as part of the chemistry curriculum. Finding teachers to teach those subjects is not an easy task considering how much trouble schools have finding any physics instructors. Teaching modern physics is harder than classical physics because it is harder to fall back on math to illustrate concepts and lack of quantum intuition. Teaching classical physics teaches valuable problem solving skills that are not taught or emphasized in modern physics courses. High schools have not mastered teaching classical physics which makes one less optimistic about how they will perform teaching modern physics. This will likely lead to a lot of inexperienced instructors teaching modern physics badly with hand wavy arguments which increase the amount of graduating students who h believe physics is opaque and mysterious.
1 comment:
That video's optimism is not grounded in reality and some of it is plainly inaccurate. Atomic structure and some modern physics is taught as part of the chemistry curriculum. Finding teachers to teach those subjects is not an easy task considering how much trouble schools have finding any physics instructors. Teaching modern physics is harder than classical physics because it is harder to fall back on math to illustrate concepts and lack of quantum intuition. Teaching classical physics teaches valuable problem solving skills that are not taught or emphasized in modern physics courses. High schools have not mastered teaching classical physics which makes one less optimistic about how they will perform teaching modern physics. This will likely lead to a lot of inexperienced instructors teaching modern physics badly with hand wavy arguments which increase the amount of graduating students who h believe physics is opaque and mysterious.
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