[Catalist] Gravity and Syllabi

[Alan Gent]

Further to my enquiry concerning gravity, thank you to all those including
Professor Blair who have found the time to put in comments. I found a lot
of them, especially the way teachers put new ideas across, very
informative.
While teaching mathematics and physics it was very obvious to me that the
contemporary syllabi were at odds with actual requirements for this
century, and in my small way, I made efforts to make them more relevant. I
found that the Curriculum Council were in fact quite flexible regarding
physics, for instance, and my course for pre-apprentices in the electrical
and carpentry/cabinet making fields side-stepped much of the conventional
syllabus, yet was satisfactorily audited.
The replies to my enquiries on Catalist concerning gravity made it quite
obvious that some teachers consider younger students incapable of grasping
concepts of space-time warping and 3D modelling. In mathematics, we also
teach quite archaic principles such as division of fractions and prime
numbers, where we should be putting more emphasis on computer program
design or anti-virus investigation. When I taught business concepts, it was
disappointing to see very little emphasis was placed on income tax
reduction or the nitty-gritty of company structures to reduce the 'bottom
line' - practical consideration when forming a business.
Although I can't see it happening in the short term, it would be really
nice to see an informed debate on how our syllabus stands up to modern
scrutiny. Professor Blair has made a start with driving in a wedge to allow
lower-level teaching of modern physics introduced by Einstein, and it has
apparently been very successful.
By the way, I am also a firm believer in rote learning in mathematics and
elsewhere. We have lost a lot from students simply being unable to multiply
without a calculator - there are some excellent examples of 6 year old
Chinese students being able to multiply very large numbers mentally by
visualising an abacus! They are way ahead of us in this field.
I believe the teaching process has to be flexible. In the Australian Trades
College, we were called 'facilitators', and I would always emphasise to the
students that it was only up to me to make it 'easier' for them to learn
(straight from the Latin derivative!)
We simply cannot be stuck in eighteenth or nineteenth century thinking in
mathematics and physics - and by the way, it's really about time that
physics was included as part of the mathematics curriculum, rather than
being estranged into the science curriculum. After all, as I tried to tell
the Education Department, Einstein was a mathematician before he was a
physicist, and I believe these two fields go hand in hand.

Alan Gent.
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