Physics, High School

I don’t know. I guess I’ve always thought students learned science best in the lab. I try to start from the laboratory and go to the classroom, whenever possible. Let them do some observing, get a functional background to base their theories on. Then take it back to the classroom. That seems to work best for me. We have fifty-five-minute classes that meet five days a week, and my classroom and laboratory are in adjoining rooms, so I can take a group from class to lab or from lab to class. I can structure my teaching time to fit the lesson needs. I don’t think there was any one thing that made me believe in the laboratory approach. It was just the way I perceived physics. You explain the natural universe while you’re looking at it. The laboratory is a good place to see what’s going on. In many science courses the kids are supposed to read what to do in the lab manual, do it, and then be graded on the answer. I just talked to a man who in a geology class at a college in Ohio was handed a card with eight rock samples glued to it and was expected to identify them later in a test. He and the rest of the students never looked at the rocks in that area of Ohio in their natural setting and were never asked to think about the geology of the region they had been raised in. This fellow said that he had grown up on the Mississippi River in Illinois, and he had never known much about the place and power of that great river valley except what he had learned from a film called “The River” by Pare Lorentz that was shown in his American history course. In my course the kids walk in on the first day and some are interested and some couldn’t care less. I structure the course around two texts, the PSSC, which was produced by the Physical Science Study Committee for the National Science Foundation course back in 1960, and the texts produced for Project Physics developed by the Harvard Study Committee.