🚀 go-pugleaf

In <Bv1uo4.6s2@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
advocates

>Teach the ideas, not the easily-forgotten details!  

This is the oft-heard notion that one should teach concepts, not procedures.
If the students have been taught that details are important, as opposed to the 
modern American approach in which sign errors are treated as trivial, they will 
tend to become meticulous in their study and understand the details.

After several decades of teaching (and research in my field) I am gradually 
convinced that evidence for the existence of concepts in the sense the word is 
usually understood here, let alone evidence for the utility or possibility of 
teaching concepts, is markedly absent.  So far as I can tell, the "concept" is 
basically a mnemonic for a set of problem-solving procedures, which are more or 
less generalizable, if one has had concrete practice generalizing them.  
Observe that the successful approach to doing physics at the graduate and 
research levels is not based on vague invocations of concepts, it is based on 
successful implementation of successful procedures, e.g. Hamiltonian and 
Lagrangian mechanics, solution of Maxwell's equations via orthogonal 
polynomials, etc.  

It is sometimes argued that the Feynmann Lectures in Physics are an example of 
the concept approach.  So far as I can tell, for almost all students (even at 
my alma mater, MIT, when I was a physics major in the early 60s) the approach 
is a failure.  The Lectures are interesting to read after you understand the 
physics, but are not effective at teaching physics.

George Phillies
phillies@wpi.wpi.edu