
GIREP Seminar
2003
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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.
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