I traveled to Los Angeles for my annual visit to Galen and his family. Using American Airlines miles forced me to take a late day flight which was scheduled to arrive at 12:40 AM. Unfortunately weather delays in including a ground stop at Charlotte meant that I arrived shortly before 3:00 and didn't get to bed until 4:00 LA time which was 7:00 in the morning Rochester time. Even so I have been rewarded with a great visit and spectacular weather. Those nasty rains have ended and the skies are blue with highs in the seventies. Late Friday afternoon, Galen and I were out driving when AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" came on. The warmth, the light, and the music reminded me of heading home on a Friday from USD ready to enjoy a Southern California weekend.
Spring Flowers
My first day, I spent at Galen's resting while he went to campus to teach a quantum physics course. I had sat in on that course and described it in an earlier blog. I came out when I did to make sure I was able to sit in on an evening class. While he was gone, I walked to closest Starbucks and enjoyed all the spring flowers just beginning their show. I got back just as Galen was returning and we enjoyed lunch at a vegan Japanese restaurant in the strip mall near their house.
I was only able to see Laura briefly that morning because she is working at real estate management office in Irvine and need to leave shortly after 7:00. She wouldn't get home till after Galen and I left for the class I came to experience. By the way, this is a temporary job that will probably end in a week unless they decided to pay her a bit more than $10/hour. It is hardly worth her time especially with the commute.
Galen and I returned to the Cal State Long Beach campus in time to walk around a bit before class. It was a beautiful evening with smiling, friendly students walking leisurely to their evening classes.
We there for an upper division physics course with an unlikely title: PHYS 390 Exploring Physics Teaching. While you might possibly think you would find this in a science education department but hardly in a physics department. Why in the world would a physics department be interested in providing a course to explore teaching physics? The answer explains a lot about the physics department at CSULB which has gone from having almost no degrees granted to 60 in ten years. In any given year, there are 250 physics majors working toward a degree. In fact, this single campus produces more physics majors than any other Cal State campus including the "science oriented" Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo and Pomona. Even more important without any effort at being "inclusive," Long Beach physics majors now are representative of this ethnically diverse campus. Each year 20 percent of the Latino students entering American Ph.D. programs in physics come from this single university. This has been achieved by focusing the analytical power of these scientists on the teaching and learning of physics.
But don't just take the word of a proud and admittedly biased father. How about the American Physical Society? Here is what it had to say when it awarded CSULB Physics department its 2016 award for improving undergraduate education in physics.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State University Long Beach has been engaged in a decade-long campaign to strengthen its programs. Total production of undergraduate physics degrees has increased from 3 in 2007 to 25 in 2014 and an estimated 35 in the 2015 academic year. 30% of degrees are awarded to under-represented minorities (URMs), and they have no achievement gaps in graduation rates between URM and majority students, nor between men and women. Implementing many of the recommendations of the SPIN-UP report, such as innovative curricula and SCALE-UP classrooms, has improved their undergraduate curriculum with a measurable increase in the graduation rates of students taking introductory physics. In addition, adopting the Colorado Learning Assistant model has allowed the department to use their upper-division students to improve their lower-division courses while also providing valuable training for their majors. Students who complete the LA training course have significantly elevated graduation rates. In summary, the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CSULB has made significant, research-based and quantitatively assessed improvements throughout their program and achieved a transformative increase in the number of physics degrees awarded at the University, particularly to URM students, along with improved education of not only their majors but all STEM students.
So a course that focuses on learning and teaching fits right in with this focus. While some of the students enrolled may go into high school teaching, all the students gain a deeper understanding of how people learn and therefore what some successful teaching strategies might be. And every physicist--whether in a formal teaching position or not--is constantly teaching non-physicists about physics. Just ask one.
Here is a sampling of topics from the course syllabus: Discourse, Questioning, Close/Open questions, Learning theory, Metacognition, Multiple intelligence. Not the kind of content you would expect in an upper division physics course. The course is taught in an Active Learning Classroom which facilitates student interaction and teacher coaching.
Students measuring the motion of a model car
As I watched this two hour session, something was happening of which I was unaware. The problem was to measure the motion of a car. There were four groups working this. Galen was coaching two of them and his associate was coaching the other two. Galen was very specific about the definition of the problem and the methodology to be used. I was not around the other two groups. The results were fascinating. Galen was using what he later described to the student as a univocal approach, one in which there was only one way of understanding and conducting the experiment. This is typically the way science labs are set up. As you would expect, both of his groups got the "right" answer and worked very efficiently to arrive at that answer. The problem was that they never engaged in a process of discovery to understand what was meant by "motion" and to settle on a way of measuring it. The other two groups were not given explicit instructions and receiving affirmation and coaching from the associate. They had the necessity and thus the opportunity to discover. Getting the "right" answer was not the point. Learning was the objective and the way typical labs are set up actually impede rather than foster discovery.
The next day I went with Galen for his morning class but didn't attend. Instead I met up Henry, his son, who is in the midst of his first year at CSULB. It turns out that Henry begins college with 55 college credits because of his excellent results on eleven Advanced Placement Tests for the ten AP courses he took in high school. By next year he will be essentially through with his general education requirements and will settle into his history major along with a minor yet to be determined. We had coffee and walked around campus. It was a very enjoyable experience as we discussed philosophy, history, politics, Civil War, Pickett and Muir family history and his high school and college experience. The three of us went to lunch and laid plans for some movie going over the weekend.
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