Category Archives: Education

Within Epsilon of the Truth

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Excellent Approximations and Lying to Children

[I]t’s true that Euclidian geometry is only a special case of the mroe general geometry of spacetime. But it’s an amazingly good approximation to any situation you will ever encounter. Which is why we teach it to children– because it’s vastly simpler, and the cases where it doesn’t work are very far from everyday experience.

The post on which this comment is based seems to propose doing things the hard way — why teach non-Euclidean geometry without having the foundation in Euclidean geometry. Do you really want to teach that kinetic energy is \((gamma -1)mc^2\)   and, perhaps more importantly, do you want to derive how you got that, rather than going with the Newtonian approximation that’s going to hold as long as you are limited to everyday speeds?

Physics curricula aren’t perfect — I think e.g. the Bohr model can do more harm than good — but then again that’s not really an example of a model that’s approximately correct. The suggestion that we abandon teaching classical physics and instead we dive into quantum and relativistic topics (starting with lasers at Eight O’clock on day 1) means explaining the details while simultaneously trying to get across basic ideas like forces and energy. I think that’s a lot to ask a student to digest.

What Burnout?

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Graduate School Burnout Quantified

For most graduate students in physics, a research focused career ranks more attractive than teaching, government work, or science outreach and writing. Most PhD physicists, however, will never attain a tenure-track position at a university. Upon entering graduate school, many students realize that the odds are against them, but they push forward regardless.

[Sigh] Another story on grad school. This idea that it isn’t until one enters graduate school that one is clued in that most PhD physicists don’t go on to become research professors is a curious one; I think that physics undergraduates are more capable at math than that.

I suspect that the reason a research career becomes less attractive as one goes through school is that one learns some of the details of what research entails. The number of hours, the bureaucracy, the amount of time the professor is doing things other than actual research — the things you only get to see close-up. This is actually mentioned in the study; they also mention that they asked the students to not consider the availability of jobs when assessing the desirability.

… But You Can Derive Everything Else

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I was thinking about the bit in the Grace Hopper video I linked to the other day, in which she complains about the mental challenge when she did her initial navy training: she had forgotten how to memorize, and there was a lot of memorization involved. As she put it, you can’t derive the organization of the navy.

In physics, however, you can derive a lot of things. I don’t recall exactly when I realized it, but somewhere along the way I realized that I didn’t have to waste time memorizing page after page of equations, because from a few basic ones, many others can be derived. This is clear right off the bat in physics, because the first topic taught is usually kinematics, and all of the equations derive from the mathematical definitions of acceleration and velocity being derivatives. Doing the proper integral recreates a whole bunch of equations. Applying them properly (i.e. adding in some trig and algebra) yield a whole host more that many students memorize (like several related to projectile motion).

I had trouble convincing most students of this when I was teaching. Invariably, they would blanch in horror at the suggestion that they derive equations, but these were typically not the physics majors who were resisting me, so perhaps that’s one of the kinds of thought processes that separate us from other other kinds of students, even within STEM topics. (though even physics majors are not totally immune to the “you’re not going to actually make me apply the math I learned in math class” attitude.) So it was nice to hear RDML Hopper say that.

Are We Really That Surprised?

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U.S. State Science Standards Are “Mediocre to Awful”

“A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).

Intellectualism and Scientific Literacy

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Mastering complexity

[W]e live in a world where it’s de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe, but quite all right to be proudly ignorant of Faraday, Pasteur or Einstein. It hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way. But right now, there’s a trend in society towards scientific apathy, and even antagonism. This is dangerous for us all and it’s incumbent on the scientific community to address the issue.

I think it’s de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe if you want to claim to be an intellectual (which, as I have said, I do not). But I think one must note that literacy is a term we associate with a minimum level of capability. One who is literate can read, but that does not mean that said person will be able to appreciate the works of Shakespeare (or Molière or Goethe). That next level is where we find interactional expertise, and we need to be clear whether we expect this, or simply literacy. But anyone claiming to be an intellectual cannot legitimately exclude math and science from their arsenal.

Somewhat related to this topic, I have to say that Howard Johnson Jennifer is right! in Meet Me Halfway

It’s frustrating. That frustration is often expressed in a renewed cracking of the whip, insisting that scientists just need to do better in communicating via public outreach. While I agree that the scientific community should (and is) working to improve in that area — heck, I do this for a living and still am constantly striving to improve! — what Hasson’s research clearly shows is that genuine communication is a two-way street. Scientists — a.k.a., the speakers — are only half of the equation, and thus they are only half of the problem.

The other half of the equation are the listeners; any type of communication will fail if it doesn’t have a receptive audience. And I’d go one step further. We tend to think of listening as a passive act, but it actually requires some effort in order to achieve that elusive connection. Particularly when it comes to bridging a gap, as with scientists and the general public, the listeners need to be more actively engaged, more invested in having a true conversation.

This is a view I’ve held for a long time. There are concepts that do require years of college to get a handle on, and reading a pop-sci book is not a substitute. You have to go out and expend some effort to have your interactional expertise if you want to be part of the conversation.

All of which ties in to a session I attended on scientific literacy (Is encouraging scientific literacy more than telling people what they need to know) at ScienceOnline 2012. We agreed that it’s important, because science appears in many places and people need to be able to make informed decisions, but in light of Jennifer’s post, I think one must add that people need to be motivated to want to make informed decisions, and take steps toward that end.

There was an interesting exercise in which the (Canadian) moderators gave a short dialogue about a curling result, and used the collective sports (il)literacy as an analogy for science (though it’s not the first time one might have thought of this). Since I lived in Canada for 2.5 years and am familiar with curling, though, I didn’t get the full benefit of the exercise.

The FTL neutrino experiment came up as well, and I wish I had better notes because I don’t recall exactly what the objection was — something about conflicting information being presented, but this is because most physicists are not neutrino experts and there’s a difference between literacy and expertise. I pointed out that in some ways, the issue actually raised scientific literacy, because it was a demonstration of the scientific process.

There was a very interesting example given by one of the moderators (Catherine Anderson, with whom I talked at length about this after the session) about some science-camp exercises that were modeled to be like a CSI investigation. Clues were given and the students had to gather evidence and make their case, but one of the driving lessons of the exercise was that there was no right answer, just as in any part of “real” science — you do your experiment and then have to interpret the results. There’s no “right answer” to compare it to, which is one of the tougher concepts I’ve had to try to convey in introductory physics labs back when I was doing that sort of thing. The students get the idea that experimental error was the difference between what they got and what the textbook said they should get. I occasionally try and think of ways one could do a lab where the “right” answer isn’t available, so the students would have to the chance to do something that compared to real science investigation, and understanding the process of science and how uncertainty/error fits in is a big part of scientific literacy

Losing the Lecture

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Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

[L]ecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

Given that it’s been the form of instruction for such a long time, it must have some effectiveness. I have nothing against improving teaching techniques, but it seems to me this piece is doing a bit of attacking a straw man. It may just be that they have not properly defined the teaching style they are criticizing.

There’s the example of students not understanding that gravitational acceleration is independent of mass of the object, but the students “get it” after seeing the professor drop two balls. To me, that implies that the professor wasn’t doing that demonstration in the lecture. Similarly,

“Students have to be active in developing their knowledge,” he says. “They can’t passively assimilate it.”

implies to me that the professor isn’t doing anything to engage the students. Which, to me, is simply a sign of bad instruction. So if they are against the Buelleresque “In… what… waaayy… does the author’s use of the prison…” where the students are drooling on their desks, I’m there. But is anyone surprised that engaging the students gives better results than one-way verbal-only communication? Because that seems kind of obvious.

A Visit from the Stork

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Why doesn’t America like science?

The views that Bloomberg considers “mind-boggling” are not outliers, or not outside the coastal areas such as New York, where he resides.
But common or not, the spread of this sentiment is leaving many American scientists alarmed. Last month, New Scientist magazine warned in an editorial that science is now under unprecedented intellectual attack in America. “When candidates for the highest office in the land appear to spurn reason, embrace anecdote over scientific evidence, and even portray scientists as the perpetrators of a massive hoax, there is reason to worry,” it thundered.

Perhaps people think that new products and innovation are the result of the technology fairy, rather than application of the underlying science and that the technology works by magic.