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Mathematics and physics – should we “unteach” the teachers?
Darko Kapor, Agneš Kapor
Department of Physics, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro



GIREP Seminar
2003


One of the basic problems in teaching Physics is its correlation with Mathematics. However, in practice the “correlation” here simply means that physicists should comply with the program of Mathematics and make no “excursions” out of this framework. During the recent education reforms in Serbia, a lot of subjects were either completely excluded from Mathematics in the elementary school (e.g. vectors) or “moved” to higher classes (e.g. straight line plot). This implies that physicists should not use vectors in their teaching. Yet, their basic education is based on vectors and many other mathematical tools, and they feel rather confused. One often used solution to the problem is to tell the students about the vectors during teaching of Physics and then use them further on. There is a strong opposition of the experts in school pedagogy and psychology to this solution, now even supported by the parents. Another option is to help teachers to avoid Mathematics without depriving the Physics of its basic contents. The first step should be to prepare a new kind of textbooks using this approach and some steps in that direction were taken during the last two years. However, another important step would be to take this into account during teachers’ education, i.e. to try to make them not too dependent on mathematics from the beginning, for example during the General Physics courses. An experiment in this direction is now in progress.