Teaching Physics...
The typical topics in a high school physics course leads students to believe that physics is all about memorizing things that were discovered a few hundred years ago. If they are lucky, students might get a glimpse at some "modern physics" - you know, the stuff that was done 50-60 years ago.
Sean Carroll (the physicist) thinks we should be doing it differently,
"What we need to do is find a new way to teach the spirit of physics. What we do now is water down what professional physicists do and make it into this dry puzzle-solving thing with little pictures of pulleys and things like that. We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That’s not a hard thing to know. But that’s not what’s emphasized."
I agree. If we want kids to be inspired to go into science, we should probably let them explore the big questions and frontiers of science.
