Are Introductory Physics Problem Dehumanizing?

In my alphabetical album iPod listen-through, I'm currently in the middle of "The Eclipse and Reappearance of the Human in Higher Education," a series of talks hosted by the Christian Study Center of Gainesville in 2008. (Apparently, I need to clean out my podcasts.) It's been refreshing to relisten to these conversations (especially hearing the voices of people from Gainesville I haven't seen in some time).

But for the fist time, I turned the question of whether higher education is dehumanizing on my own field of interest: physics education. The first thought that came to my mind was the classic argument between physics professors and their introductory students about all these problems in our textbooks that ask students to ignore friction and air resistance. (Consider the comic above and the classic "spherical cow in a vacuum" joke.)

Students constantly complain that these problems are useless; physics professors insist that anything that takes place in the real world is too difficult for introductory physics.

While I make this argument every semester (Once, I tried to circumvent the argument by asking the students to consider an experiment on the airless moon; I then had to spend half an hour convincing my students that there is no air on the moon...), it occurs to me that one could consider the imposition of these artificial conditions to have a dehumanizing effect on the student.

Think of just a couple implications of a frictionless airless world: First of all, we couldn't live in this world, so our idealized experiments have no humans to operate or watch them. Second, we couldn't walk in this world, because friction is necessary for walking.

If you couple these implications with the stripped-down nature of the objects under consideration in physics problems (purposeless blocks on inclined planes that lead nowhere, spheres and triangles suspended from pulleys for no reason), you quickly find yourself immersed in a human-less (perhaps human-stifling) world.

I think I need to go revise the problems in my own textbook...

Doubly Marginalized, Part 5: The Importance of Networking and Support

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

I'd like to close this series of posts with a few practical thoughts for Christians in the university and their churches. I think the greatest need that we have right now is for networking and support. Even though we are in the corner, we are by no means alone. There is a growing desire among Christian graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to learn how to pursue their studies and teaching to the glory of God and to the benefit of others (the concept of shalom in the Old Testament). Organizations like the Emerging Scholars Network or Christian Study Centers are providing networking opportunities for us to engage in this conversation and encourage each other.

It can feel awkward, sometimes, networking with those outside of your discipline; it's easier to feel like you have more in common with non-Christians in the same department than you than you have with a Christian in another (even related) department. And in a very real sense, that's the way it's supposed to be; Jesus builds His church out of all kinds of stones, and we need the support of other Christians who are not like us. (By extension, that means we need the support of those not in the university, but I'll talk about that next time.) So, here are a few thoughts that I hope will encourage us to seek fellowship with other Christians from other disciplines.

1. There's a big push for interdisciplinary collaboration---why not work up a collaboration with a fellow believer, especially when a successful interdisciplinary project would be promoted and cheered by your institution?
2. How many times have you discovered the solution to a problem in your field while you were thinking about something else? Maybe listening to that Christian physics professor drone on about femtosecond infrared laser pulses will give you the key insight into rewriting everything we believe about Mr. Darcy.
3. You might actually learn something about another field!
4. We can help each other learn how to serve Christ faithfully with our teaching.
5. We can model Christ-exalting community to our non-Christian colleagues. Isn't that part of how Jesus wants us to evangelize?
6. The struggles we face as Christian scholars are universal. I may have different conversations with my colleagues than a Christian art professor would, but we can help each other learn how to pray for our colleagues.

When have you had helpful opportunities to network with other Christian scholars? How have you found it to be helpful to your walk with God?

About Me

“Abraham believed God, traveled to Egypt, rescued Lot, and was the father of Isaac. Now, was that before or after he became the sixteenth President, fought the Civil War and freed the slaves?” –Me, Age 8

I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.

That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.

Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.

I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.

I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.

Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.