teaching physics teachers

I took a break from my no-teaching, all-research sabbatical to make a guest appearance this week in Jhumki Basu's course Recent Advances in Physics in NYU's education program. Her students are building new science units with help and ideas from current researchers. I presented not really my research, but some of my research techniques: estimation and approximation. No surprise there!

I showed on dimensional grounds that cars like the ones we currently drive will never do far better than 30 miles per gallon. 100 maybe. But never 1000. A nice result, with important implications, using only techniques that a high schooler could easily muster.

After I spoke, we discussed, and it was noted by one and all that despite the simplicity of the techniques, in fact estimation and approximation techniques are non-trivial and sophisticated. It is hard to incorporate them incrementally into the existing New York State middle- and high-school curricula. On the other hand, it is my (perhaps optimistic and/or utopian) view that if these things were the focus of quantitative education from day one, they would be easy to have mastered by the end of high school. Of course the teachers I was talking to are going into the system that exists; they can't start from scratch!

Many other interesting things came up, which I hope to blog about at some pont in the future, including students' lack of contact with machinery and hardware and electronics, and the idea (that I hold, but others don't) that education ought to give students skills and tools, rather than knowledge.