When comparing today's 'A' Level Physics with that of 35 years ago, I should have added that in the Statics and Dynamics sections (ie those parts where Newton discovered quite a lot of the material), the coverage is pretty much exactly the same.
However, I do have one reservation about todays courses - the textbooks. Bright, multicoloured, covering the topics in bite-sized chunks and occasionally containing unfunny 'jokes'. Really, they seem a little patronising. Quite unpleasant. And this may be another reason why the unknowing feel the subjects have been dumbed down, or made easier.
I fear, however, that in general they may be quite effective at covering the material and explaining it... which might help explain the improvement in grades (along with better teachers and more committed students).
And yet, and yet. Every so often their explanation seems lacking or unclear (eg Kirchoff's rules in the OCR book) - and we turn to an updating of Nelkon and Parker, the good old, big, fat, unforgiving but capacious textbook that I used.
And it often helps...
Monday, 20 June 2011
Green Film
No, not Green Lantern - which I'm sure is a fine theatrical experience - but rather this trailer which eldest recently pointed out to me:
Play it before reading on.
Lovely, isn't it?
Given that Muppet Treasure Island was unquestionably the greatest English-language film of the 1990s (*), how could I not give a mention to the trailer for the new film?
(*) With the arguable exceptions of Toy Story, Saving Private Ryan and ... no, that's it.
Play it before reading on.
Lovely, isn't it?
Given that Muppet Treasure Island was unquestionably the greatest English-language film of the 1990s (*), how could I not give a mention to the trailer for the new film?
(*) With the arguable exceptions of Toy Story, Saving Private Ryan and ... no, that's it.
A Small Comparison
If the inept Michael Gove knows bollocks-all about Physics, that isn't true of the rest of us.
So I've been comparing the A-Level Physics that eldest is doing with the one I took in 1976.
The first thing to say is that the syllabus has changed quite a lot in the intervening 35 years (35 years - Gawd!). A lot of more recent discoveries have been added, and there is good material on the Big Bang and stellar evolution, and on Nuclear Physics - including the quark composition of Hadrons, a brief smattering of Mesons, and a non-mathematical treatment of the Strong Nuclear Force.
Overall, tho', the course is still quite mathematical - and you still need to handle some simple calculus and understand exponentials and natral logarithms.
The treatment of simple harmonic motion is a little simplified, as are the gas laws and optics, but not to the point where it is significant. On the other hand, I think the electronics section is developed, electromagnetism is virtually the same as I recall it and there is more on waves.
Overall, the syllabus is reasonably balanced, and challenging. They have dropped on or two unecessary 18th & 19th Century items and added in stuff that is just as hard (particle bestiaries anyone?) It hasn't been made easier, or dumbed down, from what I have seen. I could imagine someone looking at just one part of the syllabus and saying something like 'they don't do those complicated lens formulae any more, it has got easier', but that would only look at one topic, not the balance overall.
Overall, if anything, I would suggest it has got just a teensy bit harder.
But hey, who am I to comment, I just undertstand the subject a little....
So I've been comparing the A-Level Physics that eldest is doing with the one I took in 1976.
The first thing to say is that the syllabus has changed quite a lot in the intervening 35 years (35 years - Gawd!). A lot of more recent discoveries have been added, and there is good material on the Big Bang and stellar evolution, and on Nuclear Physics - including the quark composition of Hadrons, a brief smattering of Mesons, and a non-mathematical treatment of the Strong Nuclear Force.
Overall, tho', the course is still quite mathematical - and you still need to handle some simple calculus and understand exponentials and natral logarithms.
The treatment of simple harmonic motion is a little simplified, as are the gas laws and optics, but not to the point where it is significant. On the other hand, I think the electronics section is developed, electromagnetism is virtually the same as I recall it and there is more on waves.
Overall, the syllabus is reasonably balanced, and challenging. They have dropped on or two unecessary 18th & 19th Century items and added in stuff that is just as hard (particle bestiaries anyone?) It hasn't been made easier, or dumbed down, from what I have seen. I could imagine someone looking at just one part of the syllabus and saying something like 'they don't do those complicated lens formulae any more, it has got easier', but that would only look at one topic, not the balance overall.
Overall, if anything, I would suggest it has got just a teensy bit harder.
But hey, who am I to comment, I just undertstand the subject a little....
Sunday, 19 June 2011
New Laws of Nature Discovered!
Michael Gove, our idiot Education Secretary, has pontificated thusly according to The Times - as cited in The Guardian:
Absolutely marvellous. And typically incompetent (and there are too many examples of the man's incompetence to list here).
How come he didn't check? Or get someone else too?
Or maybe he knows more about what Newton discovered than anyone else?
Gove said there had been previous attempts to make science relevant, by linking it to contemporary concerns such as climate change or food scares. But he said: "What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton's laws of thermodynamics and Boyle's law."
Absolutely marvellous. And typically incompetent (and there are too many examples of the man's incompetence to list here).
How come he didn't check? Or get someone else too?
Or maybe he knows more about what Newton discovered than anyone else?
Poem of the Week
Working Class Hero
John Lennon
As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.
John Lennon
As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.
And Again
In revisiting Liverpool, I should have recalled the gathering after the death of John Lennon.
He was murdered on December 8th, a Monday. On Sunday the 14th, there was a huge vigil and memorial gathering in the centre of the city, at St George's Plateau. Wikipedia says there were 30,000 people there.
I was watching the TV News in Birkenhead, and saw a report on the gathering. And I remember seeing people I knew in the crowd, so I went out, crossed the Mersey, and somewhat amazingly found them again and joined them. It all took about 45 minutes I guess. It was one of those days when you wanted to be with people you knew.
He was murdered on December 8th, a Monday. On Sunday the 14th, there was a huge vigil and memorial gathering in the centre of the city, at St George's Plateau. Wikipedia says there were 30,000 people there.
I was watching the TV News in Birkenhead, and saw a report on the gathering. And I remember seeing people I knew in the crowd, so I went out, crossed the Mersey, and somewhat amazingly found them again and joined them. It all took about 45 minutes I guess. It was one of those days when you wanted to be with people you knew.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Deja Views
I've been revisiting places from my past over the last few weeks. Nothing planned, it just happened that way, but it has felt slightly strange.
So a little while ago I went back to Liverpool. This was strictly a work trip, aimed at starting a conversation with a social enterprise (I hate that term) we might be able to work with.
I ended up lugging a huge overweight laptop around, so I had less time than you might expect for sightseeing - the places I spotted or remembered were either significant or just a little random
Now for over two years, immediately after leaving University, I lived and worked on Merseyside. That is, I lived on the Wirral and worked in centre of Liverpool. There used to be an old Plessey factory and offices off of Dale St, on Cheapside (demolished now).
For the trip, all we did was walk along Lime St/Renshaw St and up Mount Pleasant to the Catholic cathedral, visited some offices, had a snack in the cathedral coffee shop and walk back the same way. So we barely touched the surface of the city. But it did strange things to my head, all the same.
Liverpool has been through a lot of development and change. So the old Lewis's is closed (with the 'statue exceedingly bare' that people used to meet beneath), and looks rather sad, while cathedral seemed virtuall unchanged. Similarly the Everyman theatre, where I saw The Warp, presided over by Ken Campbell in the early '80s. Apparently the Everyman is about to undergo some significant refurbishment and will be closed for a couple of years.
A lot of the buildings, on Hope St (which joins the cathedrals of course, and used to have late night jazz club/drinking dens in some of the basements - sounds romantic perhaps in hindsight, but I just remember them being very sleazy and violent), and Mount Pleasant, seemed unchanged - spruced up even; they seemed oddly new/old. When I was there origninally, it had been in the dark, sad days of Thatcher, and the heavy-handed policing that led to the Liverpool riots (in Liverpool 8, not Toxteth, please).
From the top floor of the bright, managed offices we could see across the city, and of course the Liver Building dominated the view. That seemed wholly unchanged from the distance.
The other place of significant note was the Great Court of the British Musuem - which I can recall when it was first opened, and the Duke of Edinburgh was such a repellent visitor for the first day.
We dashed through it quickly, on the way elsewhere, and it felt strangely alien. The central commercial hub wrapping the Reading Room was always a little clinical, and on the day we were there the light - to me - seemed a little garish. Either way, it felt unusual and odd, for somewhere I worked for many years.
And then this week, the Museum won the Art Fund prize for "The History of the World in 100 things" on BBC Radio. About which we should be pleased. But the photo they used in The Guardian was quite old, and went back to the Michelangelo Drawings exhibition mounted around five years ago. When I worked there, and the Great Court was a place I was in almost every day.
So a little while ago I went back to Liverpool. This was strictly a work trip, aimed at starting a conversation with a social enterprise (I hate that term) we might be able to work with.
I ended up lugging a huge overweight laptop around, so I had less time than you might expect for sightseeing - the places I spotted or remembered were either significant or just a little random
Now for over two years, immediately after leaving University, I lived and worked on Merseyside. That is, I lived on the Wirral and worked in centre of Liverpool. There used to be an old Plessey factory and offices off of Dale St, on Cheapside (demolished now).
For the trip, all we did was walk along Lime St/Renshaw St and up Mount Pleasant to the Catholic cathedral, visited some offices, had a snack in the cathedral coffee shop and walk back the same way. So we barely touched the surface of the city. But it did strange things to my head, all the same.
Liverpool has been through a lot of development and change. So the old Lewis's is closed (with the 'statue exceedingly bare' that people used to meet beneath), and looks rather sad, while cathedral seemed virtuall unchanged. Similarly the Everyman theatre, where I saw The Warp, presided over by Ken Campbell in the early '80s. Apparently the Everyman is about to undergo some significant refurbishment and will be closed for a couple of years.
A lot of the buildings, on Hope St (which joins the cathedrals of course, and used to have late night jazz club/drinking dens in some of the basements - sounds romantic perhaps in hindsight, but I just remember them being very sleazy and violent), and Mount Pleasant, seemed unchanged - spruced up even; they seemed oddly new/old. When I was there origninally, it had been in the dark, sad days of Thatcher, and the heavy-handed policing that led to the Liverpool riots (in Liverpool 8, not Toxteth, please).
From the top floor of the bright, managed offices we could see across the city, and of course the Liver Building dominated the view. That seemed wholly unchanged from the distance.
The other place of significant note was the Great Court of the British Musuem - which I can recall when it was first opened, and the Duke of Edinburgh was such a repellent visitor for the first day.
We dashed through it quickly, on the way elsewhere, and it felt strangely alien. The central commercial hub wrapping the Reading Room was always a little clinical, and on the day we were there the light - to me - seemed a little garish. Either way, it felt unusual and odd, for somewhere I worked for many years.
And then this week, the Museum won the Art Fund prize for "The History of the World in 100 things" on BBC Radio. About which we should be pleased. But the photo they used in The Guardian was quite old, and went back to the Michelangelo Drawings exhibition mounted around five years ago. When I worked there, and the Great Court was a place I was in almost every day.
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