I taught HS physics. The basic problem imo was that math concepts were so poorly taught, that most students didn't understand why. What I mean is that most anyone can understand how to mechanically do a derivative/integral, but they have no idea why it was invented or why it's needed. No attempt was made to tie derivatives to earlier classes in slopes, cartesian graphs or ratios. Without that understanding they were lost when asked to apply math. Ppl are taught procedure not concepts.
@ripperduck Valid points all. I have seen what you say also. I've also seen something else. The math education world lately has made a real effort to teach concepts, but often, it seems, students lack the skills to tie concepts to the functional use of the concepts due to deficiencies in the mechanics, such as simple integer arithmetic. IMO, the concepts need to be built along with the procedures, I think that one without the other gets the student lost. Thanks for viewing and commenting.
@gdawgrapper It doesn't stop at HS. When I was at U of Oregon, the teaching was horrible. Profs were under great pressure to get grants in order to achieve tenure, as as NIH/NSF grants were being cut, then they had to spend the bulk of their time chasing money, or administering the money/grad students they had received. VERY little time was left for undergrad teaching. If you're a young prof who has to teach three classes per academic year, at least, that means about 80-90 hours of classroom
@ripperduck lectures. If you had never taught that series previously, you need to develop a curriculum. That means nearly 200 hours to prepare adequate lectures. They simply don't have the time, the department/uni demands that they get the research money. Upshot is that the lectures are mostly a bunch of diffiques, formulas and proofs, with no conceptual lecture. I'll never forget a young prof telling us that entropy was nothing more than a natural log of states, rather that a physical entity.
@ripperduck It made no sense because he failed to talk about heat/temperature, the ratio they create, that SI units cancel out, u r left with a pure number which tells us that a change in energy has taken place. He hadn't the time to prepare a proper lecture so that he had to simply throw a math term with no conceptual backing. This happened time and again. Oregon State U had determined that their physics students weren't learning physics because concepts hadn't been stressed. Not anymore.
I taught HS physics. The basic problem imo was that math concepts were so poorly taught, that most students didn't understand why. What I mean is that most anyone can understand how to mechanically do a derivative/integral, but they have no idea why it was invented or why it's needed. No attempt was made to tie derivatives to earlier classes in slopes, cartesian graphs or ratios. Without that understanding they were lost when asked to apply math. Ppl are taught procedure not concepts.
ripperduck 2 months ago
@ripperduck Valid points all. I have seen what you say also. I've also seen something else. The math education world lately has made a real effort to teach concepts, but often, it seems, students lack the skills to tie concepts to the functional use of the concepts due to deficiencies in the mechanics, such as simple integer arithmetic. IMO, the concepts need to be built along with the procedures, I think that one without the other gets the student lost. Thanks for viewing and commenting.
gdawgrapper 2 months ago
@gdawgrapper It doesn't stop at HS. When I was at U of Oregon, the teaching was horrible. Profs were under great pressure to get grants in order to achieve tenure, as as NIH/NSF grants were being cut, then they had to spend the bulk of their time chasing money, or administering the money/grad students they had received. VERY little time was left for undergrad teaching. If you're a young prof who has to teach three classes per academic year, at least, that means about 80-90 hours of classroom
ripperduck 2 months ago
@ripperduck lectures. If you had never taught that series previously, you need to develop a curriculum. That means nearly 200 hours to prepare adequate lectures. They simply don't have the time, the department/uni demands that they get the research money. Upshot is that the lectures are mostly a bunch of diffiques, formulas and proofs, with no conceptual lecture. I'll never forget a young prof telling us that entropy was nothing more than a natural log of states, rather that a physical entity.
ripperduck 2 months ago
@ripperduck It made no sense because he failed to talk about heat/temperature, the ratio they create, that SI units cancel out, u r left with a pure number which tells us that a change in energy has taken place. He hadn't the time to prepare a proper lecture so that he had to simply throw a math term with no conceptual backing. This happened time and again. Oregon State U had determined that their physics students weren't learning physics because concepts hadn't been stressed. Not anymore.
ripperduck 2 months ago
Impressive! Some very good points. Thanks for sharing this.
patrickimo1 5 months ago