A new semester
Published on Aug 27, 2006 at 9:51 pm.
No Comments.
Filed under college teaching.
The Fall Semester is about to start. My classes are mostly full. The college has record enrollment. And, of course, every one of the new students is going to want to park in faculty parking tomorrow. I figure that I’ll be lucky to find a spot anywhere on campus. It is always tough the first few weeks of the semester.
This semester, I’ve got a tough load. I have two full classes of first semester non-majors introductory physics. That is my least favorite class to teach. It isn’t that I don’t like the material, because I do. The problem is that despite attempts by the faculty for years to impose minimal mathematics prerequisites for the course, that administration has resisted. Their position is that the non-majors physics requires nothing more than high school mathematics. Well, I agree. The problem, though, is that the high schools are not teaching high school mathematics. So, the majority of my students enter without sufficient mathematics skills to do well in the class. Worse, I get the impression that many of the high school physics classes don’t really teach physics, either. At best they teach a few equations and how to plug things into them, but not how to solve problems. At worse, they don’t even teach that.
This class has the highest attrition rate of all classes that I teach. The first semester majors physics isn’t nearly as bad, since we require calculus for that, and the students know what they are getting into. I try to tell the students that they will have to work HARD for this class, and a few listen. Even those that are a little shy of the mathemetics that they need can learn it on the fly if they work hard enough. Most don’t work hard enough. Again, it seems that in high school they can get away with doing most things in class and then studying the night before a test. That doesn’t work in college — not for this class certainly. It is really discouraging to teach this class. I hate to see students not succeed, especially if I know that they could succeed. Second semester physics is far more fun to teach, since they know what they are getting into. I rarely have students drop or fail that class. So, tomorrow, I’ll give my talk about how much work that they’ll have to put into the class. They will ignore me, of course, as they always do. And, of course, this is a mathematically based class, so their isn’t much I can do if the students don’t have the background to understand the class.
Now, that isn’t the only class that I teach. I am also teaching planetary astronomy. That should be interesting tomorrow, since I’ll have something new to talk about!
-Astroprof
