Re: How not to do math. (Re: dumbing down of physics)

morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Or has it become a feedback loop upon itself?
I think it's an endless loop. It was already in existence when I started
teaching in the late '80s. The internal politics demanded high graduation
rates but, at the same time, I had students who were fresh out of high
school who were inadequately prepared and, a sesquidecade earlier, wouldn't
have graduated.

An endless loop with a neverending downward spiral.

I noticed how things got worse over the years that I was teaching. Now that I've been away from it for a while, I'm sure it's become worse.

<snip>

I do know of some of my colleagues who, because they didn't know the
material even after teaching it several times, still diluted it.

How did these guys manage to stay in their jobs, and not know the
material they're suppose to be teaching?

Two words: student evaluations. If the kiddies liked them, they had a good chance of keeping their jobs.


and/or they're too pessimistic about the performance of

their students.
I never knew of that being done.

The cases I'm aware of, where instructors were pessimistic about their
students and watered things down accordingly, was more common at the
junior/senior undergraduate level or masters degree level courses.

How much of that was due to political pressure to maintain pass rates and, thereby, department reputations?


Often, I knew that some courses weren't
completely taught. In other words, the instructors never got through all
of it. The idea was that it is better that the students knew the material
well rather than teaching all of it. That was all fine and dandy, but when
some of those courses were prerequisites, it made for a number of
difficulties. Often, I spent a lot of my course time teaching students
material what they should have learned previously or didn't bother about.
That, in turn, sometimes reduced what I had time to teach.

What was the most egregious case of this happening? (ie. Besides
kids who couldn't do basic arithmetic properly, and/or kids who never
saw kinetic/potential energy in previous physics courses).

Situations such as what I described put me often put me in a difficult position. On the one hand, I was pressured to get the students to learn the material "well". On the other hand, I might get into trouble for not teaching the entire outline. Someone could complain, after all, about paying for a full course and not receiving it.

I believe I mentioned the case of one of my last students. He was in my hydraulics course and I assigned a class project. One day he came to me and asked whether a pipe which has xx feet of head loss had to be xx feet long. That by itself wouldn't have been so bad if my course was the first time he had seen that concept, but he had taken a fluid mechanics course the previous year.


The most egregious cases of something like this happening which I'm
familiar with, were specialized junior/senior undergraduate courses on
nuclear physics and/or particle physics, where some students never
even saw special relativity previously. (For some students, they
couldn't even remember any of the stuff from quantum mechanics
either). Both courses required a previous understanding of special
relativity and basic quantum mechanics

All of that gets shoved onto the next prof or instructor and so he or she is then expected to teach a course and some change.


I shudder to think of how many students graduated with incomplete
educations because of that policy.

These days it's possible to get a math degree, without ever taking any
proof-heavy courses. I suppose these days it's possible to get really
watered down engineering degrees from accredited universities, with
many technical courses being replaced with Dilbert style courses.

I'm sure many of them have been by now.


On a different note, I found a relatively recent edition of Halliday &
Resnick at a garage sale earlier today. (It was the 6th edition with
a copyright date of 2001). From skimming it over several times, it
looks really watered down to the point that it's just as dumbed down
and stupid as other post-y2k freshman physics textbooks. Perhaps the
watering down is done deliberately and in sync, since instructors
won't use textbooks which are considered "too rigorous"? (ie. Harder
rigorous freshman textbooks won't sell as many copies).
This dilution of textbook content makes me wonder what the authors might
think of it.

If Halliday and Resnick are still alive, I'm sure they're "holding
their noses" every time they have to make an updated new edition of
their textbook.

I guess the degree of control over what goes into each edition is dictated by the publishers.

Sears and Zemansky's textbook is actually still being
updated regularly, though by their co-author successors (Young and
Geller). I'm sure they (Sears + Zem) would be spinning in their
graves if they ever saw the abomination that has become of their
classic freshman physics textbooks.

.

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