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...

What We Think We Know & Believe

After many delays, I'm hoping this marks the return of Corner Interactions for the Fall 2010 semester!

I've got many exciting things going on this Fall, including participating in a book club with other JU faculty to read "How Learning Works" by Ambrose, et al.



The first chapter is about how students' prior knowledge about (or related to) a subject area impacts (for better or worse) their learning in that subject area. Prior knowledge & beliefs help learning if they are activated, sufficient, appropriate, and accurate. (Programmers & inductive Bible-study people will notice the AND there.) However, if prior knowledge & beliefs are unactivated, insufficient, inappropriate, or inaccurate, they're actually detrimental to the learning process. (Programmers & inductive Bible-study people will notice the OR there, and notice that a rough statistical estimate suggests that prior knowledge & beliefs harm more often than they help.)

(You might notice I included "beliefs" with "knowledge," which are not terms we usually pair together in academia. However, research increasingly indicates that what a student believes about a subject drastically impacts how well they learn it. I'll write more about that later...)

The authors provide the simple example of students learning the concept of "negative reinforcement" in behavioral psychology, in which students very often associate "negative" with bad, concluding that negative reinforcement is actually a form of punishment (thereby ignoring the "reinforcement" part of the term, which is less familiar).

It seems to me this concept is also true spiritually. Our preconceptions (of what we know & believe to be true spiritually) drastically impact our reception (or rejection) of more spiritual truth. Perhaps, even, the majority of our disagreements as Christians come from unactivated, insufficient, inappropriate, or inaccurate prior spiritual knowledge & beliefs?

Struggling with Service

This Sunday, my church's senior pastor presented a great challenge about service and hospitality. He made some great comments, including (paraphrased)

1. Burnout is not a result of doing too much but of wrong motivation.
2. Availability/life station should be a factor in our service, but not an excuse for not serving.
3. We should not let our gifts pigeonhole us into a certain venue of service.
4. Our gifts need development through use.
5. The best way to discern our gifts is to start serving and see what people notice about us. (Could this be considered a genetic algorithm? But I digress provocatively...)

It occurs to me that, not only does the church struggle to put these truths into practice, but the university does, as well. Service is one of the "Big Three" when it comes to faculty expectations (along with teaching and scholarship), and faculty (Christian and non-Christian) also struggle with motivation-based burnout, a sense of unavailability, pigeonholing themselves, lack of development, and lack of self-awareness.

If Christian faculty proactively learned to adopt these principles in serving the church and the university, one can only imagine how it would revolutionize our example to other believers and our witness to the academy.

How have you struggled with service? How have you dealt with motivation, availability, self-awareness, and development?

What should an ECC elder believe about the creation of the universe?

This was the question posed to me as an essay assignment (only one page!) at a leadership development class at my church (ECC).

 

I found this question very interesting not just because of its relevance to my professional life, but because it was the only question on the assignment list phrased in terms of "What should an elder at ECC believe" and because, in my opinion, it offers the most room for disagreement and debate out of all the questions on the list.

 

I'm pasting in my answer below.

 

Beliefs

An elder at Eastside Community Church (ECC) should believe…

1. God made the universe good.
   
2. God made the universe out of nothing.
   
3. The universe is separate from and dependent on God.
   
4. The universe reveals God's glorious character (including, but not limited to, His wisdom and sovereignty).
   
5. The universe inspires worship of God.
   
6. The universe glorifies God, even apart from the worship it inspires.
   
7. The universe was placed under humankind's care.
   
8. Humans, specifically, are part of creation, are radically different from the rest of creation, are created in God's image (in particular as creators and cultivators), and are the pinnacle of creation.
   
9. The universe is fallen.
   
10. The universe will be restored.
    
11. God's truth and nature's appearance do not always seem to agree.
    

Many of these Beliefs are depicted pictorially in Figure 1.

 

Applications

Based on these Beliefs, an elder at ECC should…

1. Actively engage and support the efforts of congregation members to understand, care for, and cultivate creation.
   
2. Affirm the significance of human beings, especially in light of our present day's dehumanizing intellectual and moral culture (which is desperately seeking an answer to this problem).
   
3. Assess present-day challenges (from the external world and from within the church) to these Beliefs and respond accordingly.
   

Open Issues

On the following list of creation-related issues, an elder at ECC should allow disagreement and encourage healthy, informed discussion among the elders and within the congregation. In such discussion, an elder (and all Christians) should seek to understand how each opinion can be seen to glorify God. To be conversant in these issues, an elder should strive to understand relevant scientific research & biblical interpretation and adopt the appropriate terminology.

1. The interpretation of quantum mechanics.
   
2. The age and development of the universe.
   
3. Evolutionary theory.
   
4. The origin of humans.
   
5. The origin of carnivorism/omnivorism.
   
6. The development of language.
   
7. God's relationship to time.
   

Figure 1. Pictorial representation of the Beliefs summarized in this essay.

-----------------------------

Your turn: What should a leader at your church believe about your field of study?

The Moral Dimension of the Mind, a la Sire

I've been rereading Sire's Habits of the Mind, and just finished his challenging Chapter 5: The Moral Dimension of the Mind. In it, he lays down the truth that should haunt all Christians:


We only know/believe what we obey. Or, we are responsible for living based on what we know.


Thus, Christian intellectuals bear a great deal of responsibility.

Here is the great dichotomy that I found on this reread:


We fail in our responsibility as Christian intellectuals, and so Christian intellectualism needs the gospel. But living out the gospel (the actions he describes as aspiration--setting our minds on what is good--and mortification--denying our flesh) requires Christian thinking (and therefore Christian intellectualism). Each necessitates the other.


In general, in fact, the only way to respond to the gospel is in obedience, and the only way to obey is to believe the gospel.


But what does all of this have to do with being a Christian physicist? I came up with a few answers...

• I need to connect physics to worship.
• I am a teacher, and not just a physicist. (This thought also led me to consider the differences between the terms "physics teacher," "physicist teacher," and "teacher physicist." I'll tease out those differences in another post some day...) I need to value my students, their learning, and their future.
• Physics is applied to help creation. (I normally say, "help humanity," but with all the thoughts of the oil spill floating around in my head, and my multi-year-long fascination with the Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1, it occurred to me that I needed to expand my understanding of my own sphere of responsibility. Again, probably more about this in a future post...)

Summertime

...and the bloggin is easy. Apparently not, since I haven't posted most of this month! I think I'll post sporadically over the summer. It's been a good year but my brain is tired...

A few personal updates:

• My five year anniversary with Amy Lane is this Friday!
• I started teaching Aviation Physics as a hybrid course last week. I've never taught (or seen) a hybrid introductory physics course. So far it's going well. (Of course, we haven't hit free-body diagrams yet...)
• I'm listening through Beethoven's Symphonies, as conducted by Leonard Bernstein. I'm halfway through #5, and find it sad that the second movement is so often upstaged by the first.
• I'm trying something very different in my Electromagnetic Theory I course in the Fall; more on that later...
• I'm re-reading Sire's Habits of the Mind. As always, when I re-read a book, I find myself wondering why I highlighted some of the things I did, and why I didn't highlight others. Sire & Newman are right: The mind is like a mountain climber...

See you around!

Expo Pics and the Questions that Matter

The EPA Expo weekend before last went great! We're very proud of our students. You can find pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/110636788435437003869/EPA_EXPO_2010#.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

LOST is quickly drawing to a close. There are three regular episodes left before the two-hour finale. As the title of the show implies (and as conversation with any LOST fan will reveal), LOST is a show that raises many questions. What happened to so-and-so when she disappeared? Why did That Guy kill That Other Guy? What is The Monster? (For those of you who stopped watching mid-stream: No, we still don't know!)

There are perhaps 1,000 little questions that LOST has yet to answer, and many of us are wondering how the writers are going to answer them in only 5 more new hours of programming. I'm beginning to wonder if they intend to answer any of the little questions.

In fact, that seems to be their point as we head toward the finale: Not all questions matter equally. (In fact, one character even explicitly stated this back in Season 4: "Why don't you ask the one question that does matter?") They want us to focus on the big questions, which right now are basically boiled down to: What is the Monster? What is the Island? Who is Jacob?

While this frustrates me as an academic (I should have the ability to find the answer to any question, no matter how obscure!), I wonder if I need to be reminded that this is, in many ways, how God works.

In Scripture, we don't get the answer to every detail-oriented question: How many angles & demons are there? Was John the Baptist really saved before he was born? How old is the universe? What is "gopherwood?"

And from the point of view of the main themes of Scripture (the "Monster," the "Island," and "Jacob," if you will), these questions don't ultimately matter.

And perhaps this is not contrary to an academic mindset. After all, don't we teach our students to pick out the main ideas & themes of a work? Don't we want them to identify and readily employ the primary equations of a section?

Looking forward to May 23!