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nightengalesknd) wrote2004-08-02 09:40 am
Missed metaphors
Physics majors, prepare to laugh. Or cover your ears. Or something.
I only understood two weeks of my high school physics course. Oh, I did fine in physics. I did fine in all my high school classes. But there were really only two weeks when I felt comfortable with the material, felt as though I had a sense of what was going on.
Those were the week we studied sound, and the week we studied light. Well, I had played the violin (badly) for much of my childhood, and I had a pretty good intuitive idea about waves traveling along strings, waves of sound traveling through the air. I knew that my favorite A, the one I heard the Boston Symphony using to tune up, it was at 440 Hz. And when I say light, I don't mean wave-particle duality, and fiberoptics and all that, but the basics about colours, wavelengths, mixing, focusing. And, well, I was a techie and a pretty good hand with a Rosco gel book. I knew how to move the lenses around to make a sharp or diffuse spot of light. And, well, I wore eyeglasses, too. Relevance, right on the bridge of my nose. Suddenly, for two weeks in the spring of my senior year of high school, physics made sense.
For the rest of the year, I pushed numbers around and took a great deal on faith. For, the rest of the year, physics seemed to call upon an innate sense of the world around us, a sense which I alone did not seem to share. I knew I was in for trouble from Day One, when I came home with my first assignment to sharpen our skills of estimation: how many McDonald's Hamburgers would fill Fenway Park.
Fenway Park. That's the baseball one, right?
Everyone else in my class was a baseball fan to some degree, the twelve boys and the four other girls. I had been to one baseball game, nearly ten years previously. Oh, and its not as though I had ever seen a McDonald's Hamburger at close range, either. I begged my father, baseball aficionado, sometime hamburger eater, and former chemistry major for some help.
Most of physics was like that. Oh, I learned Newton's Laws, and where to find the numbers to plug into the related equations. I dropped hypothetical objects off cliffs and rammed theoretical pool balls into each other, and crunched the numbers with the best of them. But there was this constant undercurrent to the class, like I was missing something.
The biggest thing I was missing, actually, was not knowing how to drive a car. I wasn't ready to drive at that point, and had made the mistake of saying so. This had long been a point of ridicule outside the classroom. And it had come up from time to time within the classroom as well, such as the day in French class we were learning to express wishes. We went around the table, reading our sentences aloud. With one notable exception - me - the wish of every tenth grader was to get a learner's permit, that of every eleventh grader was to obtain a driver's license, and that of each senior was to own a car. But this was different. In French, the car talk had been self-generated, internal. My learning didn't depend on what my classmates did or did not drive. This was external.
"You know how when you're driving, and you go around a turn [speed up, stop short], you feel. . . ?"
Sixteen eager nods. One blank look. I didn't notice these things when riding, either. After I had them pointed out to me, accompanied by the appropriate physics equations, I did notice. Sometimes. But as we flitted from cars to baseballs, I never lost this nagging feeling like I was missing the whole point, the whole innate sense of - well, of everything.
Why am I rehashing all this now? Isn't physics over and done with? Well, yes, thankfully. I never have to grapple with the intro physics curriculum again. Thrice is enough. It's coming to mind again because I am having the same sort of reaction to this Immunology book I'm supposed to read this summer.
It's called "How the Immune System Works." And it is a very good thing that I already have a pretty good idea how the immune system does work, thanks to an excellent professor I had at Haverford way back when. Because this book, in addition to cheesy diagrams and some (to me) disturbingly flip comments, relys on a whole series of analogies and comparisons and models.
Turns out I don't know anything about football.
I understand cytotoxic T lymphocytes, and the two subclasses of T helper cells, but explanations of which ones are like the quarterback are simply lost on me. And, while I still understand T cells, I have gained no further insight about the function or role of a quarterback. And I resent the assumption it makes, that immunology is difficult but football is easy, familiar. Because not only have I had immunology before, but I don't recall it being too hard the first time.
It's a real dilemma when one is teaching, when to rely on students' outside knowledge.
I had it easy, of course. Yes, I am arguing that, in my school of students with severe ADD, children who had not succeeded in other settings, I had it easy. And in this respect, I did. Well, I knew my kids, for one, and I knew what models I had to refer to within their own lives. I knew that I could put Gregor Mendel in context for them by explaining that gardening was his "chore" at the monastery. (An Austrian monastery, incidentally.) We all understood chores. When my students were building bookshelves with another faculty while studying DNA with me, I explained how a chromosome is like a book of "How-to" instructions, RNA is like a photocopy from one chapter of the book, and the bookcase is like the finished protein. The kids thought I was nuts, yes, but the analogy was relevant to their shared experiences, it stuck, and they learned.
We also had the luxury of a small-group learning environment. If I wasn't getting through to one or more of my students, I could see that instantly and either try again or change techniques. I could explain the same material five different ways for five different students. We also had the luxury of time. If it took an extra week or so to learn a topic correctly, well, then we used that additional week. How much harder it is to address a class of 25, or 50 or, dare I say it? 240 unique learners. And how much harder it is when the schedule is set in stone, or the registrar's office, which is pretty much the same thing, really. And harder still must it be to write a textbook, where even the second-chance of office hours has been removed from the realm of possibility. How tempting it is, then, to make broad, sweeping assumptions in the hopes of reaching almost everyone, most of the time.
In medical school, since we all had to take the same pre-med courses, there are certain safe assumptions. We all took general and organic chemistry, and introductory physics so we could have the privledge of being here, although whether or not we remember any of that material is open for debate. In Anatomy, it was safe to assume we all come with more or less the same body plan for reference. During an exam, it is amusing to glance about the room and see someone flex an arm and another pat a leg, checking on muscles with the only model permitted in the exam setting.
I will gladly learn the anatomy, the biochemistry, the immunology, the pathology. Some of it may come easy, and some of it may be a struggle, but it is the reason I am here. But, no where in the job description of doctor, or even in those dreaded "technical standards" lists, does it say that I have to master the art of football, too.
Football. That's the one derived from Rugby, right? I think I saw a game of that, once. They threw toast.
no subject
The football thing is very interesting. They seem to be assuming that you're male and American.
no subject
The book in question, by the way, was written by a woman.
[goes to check]
No, I take that back. I had been jumping to conclusions. It was written by a man named "Lauren." Unless I am jumping to further conclusions - it is dedicated to the author's wife.
By the way, I'm home. We should do something about that, shouldn't we? Any night but Tuesday.
no subject
UGh, football metaphors in a textbook? I blame not the author, but the person who decided that this is a good general purpose text. Good for those who aren't getting it from their regular text and have a football backgroud, maybe.
no subject
It's not really a text book. Its an intro book, to warm us up over the summer. So I guess it was written to augment a general text. I am deciding not to buy the actual recommended text, by the way. It is 200 pages long. My college one is nearly 600. Even if this new text is 8 more years up to date, where do they propose to put this updated information? I think I'll just do it as reserve readings in the library and use my old standby as a book of substance.
no subject
What would you like to do? Dinner? Where? Anything else?
And did you get my email from when you were away about your last entry?
no subject
Dinner good - either my end of the city or yours, whichever is convenient. And I am open to suggestions about Anything Elseness. I'm not generally a "going to the movies" fan, but I know some of the extras in The Village, believe it or not. (That is the ONLY thing I know about said movie.)
Um, yes, I got your e-mail. I responded to it. Unless you are asking if I got a response to the response. . . So if you didn't get my response, I'm wondering who did. . . never mind that. I'll resend. Actually at this point, I'll just e-mail you, since Things Have Changed (for the better, more or less). Oh, hash. Check your e-mail in about fifteen minutes.
no subject
Being in charge
Needing to be protected
I hope that helps. I agree that it's not the best analogy.
no subject
It could be worse. It could be trying to explain a subject that I don't understand.
footballs
I should think riding in a car would be sufficient for all the car-related physics analogies, though it doesn't seem to have been presented that way. The actual driving doesn't seem to be really relevant.
Re: footballs
That's what I like about hanging out with you folks. Even when there are references I don't understand, such as "Lord of the Rings," someone explains briefly the relevant part, and no one seems to judge me the more poorly for not having "gotten" it in the first place.
Other uses
Truly, Please, I BEG OF YOU.
If you have NO other interesting use for this LJ post, send it to the op-ed editor of a journal. Education journal. Med journal. The NYTimes. The Inquirer. This was -hysterically- funny, incredibly relevant, and clearly written. Please promise you'll try to publish it on a wider basis?
--Shrewkate
Re: Other uses
I plan to publish this and similar essays, but probably not until after graduation. I'm trying to be the next Perri Klaas. . .
no subject
In physics, too, a good teacher should be able to talk about rotational motion without relying solely on one's presumed automotive experience.
We were actually discussing analogies in my Scientific Communications Seminar during my REU. We were critiquing each other's papers, and were discussing things like how, quantum mechanically, electrons have a property called "spin" even though they're definitely not little balls spinning around. Good analogies can be really helpful, but if not carefully used and qualified, they can lead to serious misconceptions.
no subject
And then there's vocabulary. Is "spin" any better or worse than, say "charmed"?
We keep playing phone tag. Sigh. I was transported to Camelot. As of now I plan to be home Thursday. . .