You wouldn't Teach a Calculus Course this way....

so why are they teaching physics without a single worked example in class? I bought a book called “How to Solve Physics Problems” today, and all of a sudden, what I've been struggling with since september becomes utterly clear. Why? Because it's just worked examples. With explanations accompanying them.

It's utter madness imho that they think that teaching physics without worked examples is alright, or kosher, in any way shape or form. It's analogous to giving us lego in the lectures and expecting us to build a rocketship on the tests. People can succeed in this course, but only the people with the resources, time, and energy to go and scrounge up Titanium Carbide. They teach the concepts, but give us no direction whatsoever in terms of the problems we're expected to master. I try to do the problems they assign, but there is very little there in terms of “How to start this problem” or, How to put less than 3 hours of time into banging away at this problem in the hopes that you may at some point understand it.

Physics isn't a hard subject, if it's taught. BUT it's not taught! Unbelievable. It discriminates against the people without the time, resources and energy to work for hours and hours on it (I know I'm in a significant minority in terms of having a kid, but people with jobs are not, and people who commute are not) and it's taught in an arcane way that doesn't take into account the changing demography of university life today. We're given a 10 pound textbook on the assumption that we live in residence, so our home is on campus, and we're told to read, each and every week at least 25 pages out of it, most weeks more. Then we're expected to be able to teach ourselves the quantitative aspects of the course out of it, and only it, since worked examples are non existant in the lecture. Our grading is entirely based on quantitative analyses, rather than any concepts they may present to us in lecture. Our tutorials are mindless busywork that keep us NOT ASKING QUESTIONS for the duration. And the physics help sessions are generally pretty unhelpful.

There are easy ways and difficult ways to go about just about every problem in physics. If they were actually interested in having us successfully learn their subject, rather than having the GPA at a certain point, they would just get along with teaching us the easy way.

Ok. that's my rant. I'm done. It's been a good 15 minute break. Back to physics now. :P