- #1
Michael12345
- 4
- 0
When you spend hours and days tediously plugging away at the mathematics of a problem, you lose sight of the actual physics of the problem (in addition to losing sight of what you found interesting about physics in the first place). The problem statements are always innocuous, but as soon as you bite into them, you realize how much of your immediate future will be consumed by this spirit-breaking labor. And at some point, when your focus drifts momentarily, you make a transcriptional error while brainlessly copying one of your many page-long expressions onto the next page, and you end up with the wrong answer, making you feel that not only have these precious days of your youth gone up in smoke forever, but that you're an idiot on top of it.
Is applying the same mathematical techniques, ad nauseam, to only slightly dissimilar problems really learning? This is where most of your time is spent in physics courses: in this thoughtless, calculating space, not accruing experience or forming meaningful associations...just writing and rewriting equations, over and over and over again.
Is there really no better pedagogy?
Is applying the same mathematical techniques, ad nauseam, to only slightly dissimilar problems really learning? This is where most of your time is spent in physics courses: in this thoughtless, calculating space, not accruing experience or forming meaningful associations...just writing and rewriting equations, over and over and over again.
Is there really no better pedagogy?