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Aug. 19th, 2004 11:56 pmI met Matt Landreman, my freshman year SWAP mentor, in Philly for dinner. Afterwards we walked around and talked for a while. He's been at Oxford on a Rhodes for the past year and will be doing research for a D.Phil. there for some years more. We sort of filled each other in on what was going on with the both of us.
I really appreciated having Matt around frosh year. This was before SWIL, so socially I basically just had SWAP. In terms of people I could talk to and eat with sometimes, I primarily had the SWAP upperclassmen like Robin and Matt. He was, like me, an SSXer; some of the first reading I did about that experiment was from his senior thesis. I remember us going running together once, heading out to Morton and back. Were it not for him, I probably would not have become involved with teaching Upward Bound physics as I did this year.
It was good to honestly and openly discuss the problems we had this past year with Upward Bound, which were similar to the ones Matt et al. had. Catherine Crouch may be helping us this coming year. With her experience in physics pedagogy, Catherine will be a valuable ally. Success (and how do you define success in such educational endeavors) will be difficult to attain, but we must try.
Having a "meaning of life" discussion, especially as it relates to physics and doing physics as opposed to other things, is healthy, every once in a while.
After dinner, we got a book to start an Upward Bound physics collection: Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein. Good multiple-choice questions, almost all non-computational but thought-provoking. I think the Mechanics section contains some good stuff. We should integrate things like this and Mazur-style Peer Instruction questions into our teaching next year. We need to bring our students to explain their physical reasoning, as the author of this book emphasizes. In any case, a Boccio-style lecture presentation, no matter how well prepared, simply will not work, as I can attest.
( Quotes from the book... )
I really appreciated having Matt around frosh year. This was before SWIL, so socially I basically just had SWAP. In terms of people I could talk to and eat with sometimes, I primarily had the SWAP upperclassmen like Robin and Matt. He was, like me, an SSXer; some of the first reading I did about that experiment was from his senior thesis. I remember us going running together once, heading out to Morton and back. Were it not for him, I probably would not have become involved with teaching Upward Bound physics as I did this year.
It was good to honestly and openly discuss the problems we had this past year with Upward Bound, which were similar to the ones Matt et al. had. Catherine Crouch may be helping us this coming year. With her experience in physics pedagogy, Catherine will be a valuable ally. Success (and how do you define success in such educational endeavors) will be difficult to attain, but we must try.
Having a "meaning of life" discussion, especially as it relates to physics and doing physics as opposed to other things, is healthy, every once in a while.
After dinner, we got a book to start an Upward Bound physics collection: Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein. Good multiple-choice questions, almost all non-computational but thought-provoking. I think the Mechanics section contains some good stuff. We should integrate things like this and Mazur-style Peer Instruction questions into our teaching next year. We need to bring our students to explain their physical reasoning, as the author of this book emphasizes. In any case, a Boccio-style lecture presentation, no matter how well prepared, simply will not work, as I can attest.
( Quotes from the book... )
