Readers weigh in on how to teach physics

How to teach statistical thermal physics in the introductory physics course

The laws of thermodynamics were formulated long before we knew the existence of atoms and molecules. The formal thermodynamics curriculum based on the empirical laws have been replaced by courses based on physical and statistical foundation of the subject in the intermediate courses in undergraduate curriculum for some time now. In these courses they show how the properties of macroscopic syste...

How to Teach The Suprasegmentals of English To Farsi-speakers Learning English as a Foreign Language

How to Teach Difference Lists?

Lists are, on the one hand, a useful modeling construct in logic programming because of their not predefined length, on the other hand the concatenation of lists by append(L1,L2,L3) is rather inefficient because it copies the list L1. To avoid the invocation of the append/3-procedure an alternative possibility is the use of incomplete lists of the form [ el1, ... elk | Var], in which Var descri...

How to . . . Teach practical skills

Practical skills teaching in medicine has traditionally been based on the principles of ‘see one, do one, teach one’. Healthcare professionals learn a wide range of practical skills over the years – from basic skills such as suturing a skin wound or the incision and draining of an abscess, to undertaking more complex technical procedures in theatre, such as appendectomy. But to what extent is t...

How to teach Quantum Mechanics

In the following Bell gives an account of the Lorentzian interpretation of relativistic effects, in which the Lorentz transformations are explained by a dynamical mechanism (including the assumption of an – though undetectable – aether) rather than derived from postulates as in the approach of Einstein. Bell concludes that teaching relativity can benefit from what he calls a “Lorentzian pedagog...