Will Physics Curriculum Move from a System of Patronage to a System of Inquiry?
Shawn Reeves
Originally written 2007-05-15
It was so easy to predict, being the pessimist that I am: Another summer of workshops is approaching, and the same old dead dog is presented to schoolteachers who want to increase their content-knowledge in physics. I look at the syllabus for the Physics Application Institute Grades 7-12 for Massachusetts teachers and I see Distance and Velocity Graphs, Free Fall, Motion with Constant Force and Frictional Force, Newton's 2nd Law, Force Pairs and Newton's 3rd Law, and Work Energy and Power, and nothing else. Whoop-de-doo! For MA teachers who want to learn more about physics this summer, there is no electricity let alone electronics, no statistics of particles, no chaos, no cosmology, no optics, no human energy use, no climate science, no quantum, no photoelectric effect, no relativity, no gravity, no fields, no waves, no nuclear force, no radiation, no sun, no phosphors, no p-n junctions, no sound, no three-body, nothing from the past 180 years of study, no iPods, no neutrinos, no positrons, no dark matter, no pulsars, no extra-solar planets, no tides, no SETI, no supernova, no isotopes, no magnets, no superconductors, no bicycles, no red-shift let alone doppler, no GPS, no diffraction, no uncertainty, no CP violations, no arrow of time, no heat death, no plasma, not even a pendulum. Just a cart going up and down a ramp, then falling to the floor with a dull thud.
You know what it's like, this sequence-follows-evolution-of-the-field, teaching only a subset of the work of just Galileo and Newton? It's as if we said to children in biology, "Darwinian evolution and genetics are too advanced for pre-college biology, so we're going to teach you creationism instead." On the contrary, modern environmental problems--toxins, global warming, composting--are taught in the ecological context even to early elementary schoolers, with support from the bio-ed community. But when it comes to physical science, who teaches K-12 students about fluorescent lights, solar cooking, photovoltaic cells? A few teachers who go it alone, with no support from us, the priests of physics; we only beat them over the head with our inclined plane and velocity-time graphs.
PER folks have responded to my pessimism optimistically, saying that methods modeled in their workshops could be applied to other physics topics. But, if that's so easy, how come that's so rare? I have a simple explanation: Most physics teachers, veteran and novice, have a hard time teaching other topics, and fall back on a feeding frenzy of research into how we can best teach how to aim to hit a monkey falling out of a tree. We're falling over ourselves proving that we have the best method to get students to retain Force Concepts, we've totally lost touch with the continuum between current science and pre-college and introductory education. In the current feedback cycle, we get better and better at teaching the old canon, and become more isolated from what students want/need to learn.
Physics teachers say there is great philosophical value in the study of motion, of Newton's third law, great beauty. To that I respond that they are physics teachers because they are the few people in the world who think that little topic is appealing. There is an obvious dichotomy between adults who want children to emulate them, and adults who want to allow children to study what they want. The latter see the former as lockstep taskmasters, and the former see the latter as touchy-feely wimps. Harsh words? Go ahead and flame me, bar me from Greensboro, whatever. Just watch the majority of students as they continue to eschew any taint of physics on their transcripts, once they get the choice (high school). Yes, some do sign up for physics, because they're told that it'll help college admissions, an externality. To their credit, many physics teachers support extra-curricular studies of more meaningful topics like solar power. I applaud the brave teacher who asks their students day one, "let's try to answer any questions you have about the physical world. Who would like to ask the first question?"
