There are a number of Physics of Baseball courses and books that teach motion. Perhaps sports might get them more involved than the typical physics problems, though I haven’t looked at your Walker book.
Okay, so these are some interesting ideas. One of my major problems is getting them to work problems themselves. They are often paralyzed. This is a primary reason I want more class time for personal attention.
In a class of 70-75, how would you get more of them actually participating in the examples? For example, when I do an example, I ask questions to have them help translate (Problem: “A 19-kg child…” Me: “19-kg, what type of quantity is that?” Students: “mass”. Me (writing): “so we write that as m=19 kg”).
I also try to get them to bring their calculators to class and calculate values in examples as we go, but only a few will actually do so. (Clickers might be possible but I detest those.)
It’s hard to convey just what a state some of these kids are in. I have some with the math skills of first graders (not an exaggeration). I’ve wondered whether some are even literate. And the paralysis is daunting.
Ok. If you have students at this level, you simply have to get over your dislike of dumbing it down. You kind of simply have to and that’s that.
If I said to you - you are teaching physics to middle schoolers - how would you theoretically do that? Think along those lines for a bit and see where it gets you.
What you want are active learners, is that correct? Find ways to reward students for paying attention and for actively participating in their learning.
How about having them do the assigned problems in class? Using clickers as a way of checking for comprehension?
Teach the day’s concept.
Do a problem together, in class, using clicker responses as a step by step check for comprehension several times. (or give a quick one or two question quiz, using clickers, as a check for comprehension, during class.)
Assign a problem to be completed in class, using clickers for students to record their answers. Be available to answer questions during this work period, and present your office hours and recitation hours at the end of every class.
Assign readings/problems for the next class.
Make it clear how you will use clicker responses in your grading.
I haven’t read the whole thread. What I hear can be effective is having students read the textbook and use Khan Academy etc. at home and then do the “homework” ie try to apply the learning while in class, with a teacher there to help. Smartboards and devices in the classroom are often part of this picture. No sage on the stage, so to speak. The teacher doesn’t lecture but facilitates learning. It can work for some and is fairer than homework, which depends on parental help and causes inequities.
Sounds like a challenging problem and that you’re on the right track toward active learning. But perhaps need a bit more background before having the students try to learn it on their own. Presenting the key points as an overview (which is probably what you are doing, but I wasn’t clear from the posts).
How do the better students respond? I think I’d be frustrated if I understood the homework and had to sit through working through the same problems during class I did during homework.Many colleges have recitation periods for going over homework.
It also seems (easier said than done) that what you are presenting perhaps has to be different from what is in the book. If kids don’t “get it”, then just explaining it the same way over again is not necessarily going to help them understand it. I still recall taking a fluid mechanics class and I was really lost at first because I couldn’t visualize in real terms what the drawings in the problem sets were depicting, particularly translating the 2-D drawing into a 3-D . At one point I just “got it” and could understand what I was looking at which, of course, made solving the problems much easier.
Motion seems to be something kids can understand, the arc of the basketball into the net, the speed of a fast ball and how it doesn’t stop until it hits something or doesn’t make it to home because the speed of the ball wasn’t fast enough to overcome gravity and friction of the air as opposing forces. But how to translate that into a classroom is of course not that straight forward. Once kids get behind it can be much easier for them to give up, then to push through it by going for extra help, or buying a book (schaums outlines helped me through some difficult classes), but that requires the students to be pro-active.
This is an interesting thread. I am glad I read it, although I am late to the party.
As a pretty much a non-STEM person since high school, I am gobsmacked by the entire premise of this thread. To tell the truth, I can’t remember much about the pedagogy in my (excellent) Bio for Poets class in college, but I can honestly say that I cannot remember a single class I took in college or afterwards that did not involve being responsible for reading about new concepts first, before being lectured to about them. Problem sets are not that common in humanities classes, of course, but I took a bunch of accounting classes, too, and econ, and we always did the reading and homework first and talked about the concepts in class later. Of course, class to class there might be less or more new material in the reading/homework. If you were in a portion of the syllabus that was cumulative, today’s p-set might not be much of a stretch if you had been to the class discussing last week’s p-set.
And in law school . . . the idea that you deserve a road map before encountering a new idea would be a Backwards Day kind of thing, something you would expect from the Red Queen in Wonderland. Classically, the case books for first-year law courses are structured in a deliberately mystifying way, to ensure that at the very outset of a course it’s especially difficult to figure out what’s going on. My first-year Civil Procedure class’s first assignment was so dense, the teacher – who was teaching it for the first time – got the central case completely wrong. My wife, a Yale summa, spent the night before her first Civil Procedure class, with a different casebook, sobbing because she had read the assignment five or six times and couldn’t understand it at all. That kind of sink-or-swim experience is absolutely central to what “education” means in law school, at least the law schools with which I am familiar.
I had no idea the paradigm in STEM was so different. I understand that one might need to proceed differently to teach the kinds of students @sylvan8798 is teaching, and that my elite law school experience is not a particularly valuable model for introductory college classes everywhere. But it boggles my imagination to see so many people on this thread reacting “that’s wrong” to a teaching method I would have thought was the standard place to begin.
@sylvan8798 : I teach math - both intro courses and those for major for students with a similar academic profile that you have:
In my experience, poor reading and math skills combined with a general lack of interest in the subject is not a great background for the type of approach you describe. I have tried it and failed miserably and have gone back to lecture/assignment/quizzes approach. And physics has an extra layer of complexity that intro math courses does not - understanding symbols, word problems, assumptions etc. Also, in this course, you have to cover a certain amount of content , right? So you have to move at a steady pace.
You may want to assign simple guided reading exercises - maybe simple “warm up” questions on the MyLab portal. Even so, they may not fully assemble the pieces in their heads to form a complete whole. A 50 minute period may not be enough to do present material and have students work on problems in class.
The extra hour a week problem solving session is a good idea - but it should be required by the department, or very few students are going to show up.
Speaking of which, what does your physics department faculty say about any of this? Surely, you cannot be the only instructor facing this problem.
^Everyone in the department sympathizes with the demoralizing difficulty of teaching this course. In the Spring I’m usually the only one teaching it. In the Fall there are several smaller sections and I have the big one under the current paradigm. Last Fall one of the previous Department Chairs (late 60’s) had a section and every time I saw him he was shuffling along muttering dejectedly about the sorry state of his intro course.
There are so many issues we have to struggle with in this course that it is hard to know where to begin. Some of them are cultural as well as academic. I also sometimes wonder whether they would respond better to a male professor. Not to mention the raw logistics of managing 70+ students. One thing I have learned for sure is that you have to get up close and in their face, but it really isn’t possible to personally tutor 70+ students through a physics course!
Yes - same here - the issue is usually not the subject material. I am a female math prof and do wonder the same thing as you. It seems my male colleagues do not expend as much time with new pedagogies - and they get better evaluations!
Speaking of being “in their face”, I do it electronically. Email lists to the whole class can be easily managed, and I do email on occasion to groups of students (bcc on the email) to see me in my office, and have them click on an appointment app (like youcanbook.me) . Well - just the act of clicking and making an appointment has increased foot traffic to my office ,even though my office hours are open and posted.
The elephant in the room is the admission of students who are, by all metrics, not really ready to be in any college course, much less an intro physics course. I bet the 6-yr graduation rate at your college/university is probably less than 50%
JHS - I just really don’t think Yale, and Stanford Law, are relevant models for these students, who are average-to-below in all 3 areas - raw smarts, preparation, and motivation to take this class in the first place.
It sounds like this course is trying to bridge a gap that is maybe too wide. It sounds like if you teach to your top students you will lose the bottom half pretty early in the semester, and if you try to do more to reach the bottom half, your top students are going to be bored, bored, bored. This might be a non-solvable problem for you to solve, and more of a problem for your department as a whole to solve, since it is a difficult class for everyone who teaches it.
mom2and, Richard Feynman remarked that he had a very similar problem with solid geometry. At first he found it impossible to interpret the 2 dimensional representations of 3 dimensional geometric figures. Then he got it. There is no doubt some interesting neuroscience behind this, but it is difficult to catch the change in real time.
One of the issues faced by sylvan8798 is that the Mechanics course is not the last that the Engineering Tech students will need to take. So they need the actual background as preparation for further courses.
I think that universities ought to follow the lead of the service academies, and introduce a prep year (or longer) for students who would add to the university, but who are not actually prepared for university work. This is particularly evident in science, math, and engineering, but probably applies to other areas, as well.
I have no problem with Pizzagirl’s suggestion that if the students need middle-school general science, then that is what they should be learning. That is correct. At the next level up, perhaps they are ready for high-school general science, or even high-school physics. Then at the next level, they are ready for college introductory physics. But at some point, the college will be graduating the students, and at that point, they ought to be on par with Engineering Tech majors who were able to start in college physics. I do not think that can be accomplished in four years. It takes a lot of heart on the part of the student to commit to a longer program, in order to have the skills that ought to go with the certification, rather than just opting for certification (the diploma).
The tremendous inequalities of the K-12 systems in the US have led to this situation. We need to correct those, but we also cannot pretend that they do not exist at the college level. The recent New York Times analysis showed that there was approximately a 5 to 6 year gap between the average performance in reading at the top performing schools and at the lowest performing schools, for students in 6th grade. The remedies need to start there. I do not think that the gap shrinks (at least not much) as the students approach high school graduation.
My university has started to delay students’ entry into science courses, based on math placement. This seems to be helping noticeably. We have also introduced a pre-freshman level course (though not a full prep year, formally).
49% - good guess!
“My wife, a Yale summa, spent the night before her first Civil Procedure class, with a different casebook, sobbing because she had read the assignment five or six times and couldn’t understand it at all. That kind of sink-or-swim experience is absolutely central to what “education” means in law school, at least the law schools with which I am familiar.”
The difference is, Yale summas at Penn Law sob, then dust themselves off, call their classmates, visit the prof, read it one more time and swim. Because they can hack this river and they don’t need floaties. These students will sink and then what has sylvan accomplished?
So sylvan, if they can’t hack your class, how do they fare in their higher level ones?
@Pizzagirl I’m “borrowing” some of those ideas to spice up a class that’s gotten a little bit dull lately - thanks!
Shouldn’t even a non-calculus-based physics course that is not a “physics for poets” general education type course have a math prerequisite? Even high schools list math prerequisites of something like algebra 2 for their high school physics courses.
At a local open admission community college, the general introductory physics course for biology majors lists calculus 1 as a co-requisite and preparatory physics (= high school physics) as a prerequisite. Preparatory physics at the community college lists precalculus as a recommended prerequisite.
“3) Have them write a tweet explaining the principle in 140 characters or less, and require them to have at least 3 hashtags. Don’t laugh at this. I have had teams do this all over the world, and it’s actually one of the best methods I’ve ever found in having people internalize information.”
Piqued my curiosity with this one, PG. I think I’ll pass this on to a few teachers, if you don’t mind.
I have asked in the department why this is not the case. Students can enroll in the course without any prereq or placement test. It seems like this is not something the College wants to do. I think it is supposed to be some kind of weed-out for the Tech program.
Some of them barely get through my course and then sink in the next one, although the primary Statics professor is known for his ridiculous upward curves, so some of them keep rising. He is also the primary Dynamics professor, so somehow they continue to rise, despite not being able to even write a vector in the proper notation. Sometimes I shudder to think of some poor employer ending up with one of these students who got out without learning a whit, of which I am sure there are a few.
I always have several students repeating the course either from my section or someone else’s. In fact, this fall it appears one of them will be a three-peat, which is not even allowed. All with me. If he actually did the work, he would have passed last time.