C4T #3

This past month I was a assigned to comment on John Burke's class blog Quantum Progress. John's earlier post focused on rethinking how he taught specific principles in his class. One thing that I really liked is that he recognized that he was not helping his students learn anything by asking them questions that went against their natural line of thinking. He illustrates this through his class in physics. When he asked a student in the class which end of a slinky falls first, the top or the bottom? The student responded that it was the bottom and then John would demonstrate the top falls first, to which the students often responded that "Physics is hard." This is when he decides that he needs to re-evaluate how he teaches. He decided to teach his students how to decide the way to find out which will fall first and then ask them which they think will occur. this is inspiring for me as a teacher because I need to change my mannerisms as a teacher to help my students understand. It is my job to make sure that they learn.

In his other post, actually his latest post and the first one I was able to read is about being able to integrate the sciences to teach principles. Though the title suggests that the post is about peer review and correction, but if you read into the post you will find this argument.
I’d like to think I would have caught this error if I’d paid closer attention to the video as I was watching it and trying to decide whether to forward it, but honestly, my recollection of the AP chemistry class I took 20 years ago is now rather faded, and redox reactions are definitely one of the gaping holes in my understanding.
"But I see this as a really exciting interdisciplinary moment—here’s a great physicist, stepping pretty far outside his area of expertise to talk about a topic in biology, photosynthesis, only to be called out on incorrect chemistry by a biologist. It’s all the more exciting that Feynman made this mistake, since it shows we all make mistakes, which is a great lesson for my students to see.
This is exactly the type of interdisciplinary learning I’d like to be setting my students up to do. However, I’m not sure I am setting them up to understand ideas like this, since they see most topics in year long courses completely isolated from one another. Could a biology student hear an explanation from a physicist about photosynthesis and bring up his understanding of redox reactions from the previous year’s study of chemistry to check Feynman’s work? I’m skeptical. And I’m sure than none of them would be able to push to the extra layer of thinking about how we might be able to know this experimentally by using radioisotopes. So how do we teach science students to think in this interdisciplinary manner?"

In both of my responses I stated that I respected his ideas, especially with his post exploring balanced forces and the nature of locality with slinkies. I posted this answer about inter-discipline learning
"Forgive my humble opinion, I am a future teacher in Edm 310 right now and am probably woefully optimistic, but I don’t think one teacher is possible or beneficial to students. I think that if you were to open the walls of our classrooms, so to speak, so that some of other subjects can bleed into our classes, this will allow students to see the connections between subjects. I think that you could take a lesson in physics through the bio-teachers point of view, maybe even having that teacher teach the lesson, and vice versa. I could also see this as only confusing to students as they would be trying to absorb information from two different viewpoints. I don’t know, it would definitely a planning nightmare to do it this way."