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Frequently the historically motivated path is too long or creates too much baggage. It's not always the case, granted, and sometimes the historical development

Frequently the historically motivated path is too long or creates too much baggage. It's not always the case, granted, and sometimes the historical development does give you the motivation, but you're still asking for a gifted teacher, and that's rare. A gifted teacher can teach with or without the historical perspective, and in my experience a clean, direct presentation with appropriate motivation and context is usually better. Again, not everything works for everyone.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"but you're still asking for a gifted teacher, and that's rare." Fair enough. Maybe a gifted teacher can write a book :-) "Again, not everything works for everyone." I agree. There are a lot of texts which ignore the history. It would be great to have a few which retraced the paths.
teeja 17y ago
Agreed. I'd have appreciated physics more if it had been taught with a more historical approach. When I asked the profs why, the general answer was 'takes too much time'. (I 'spect part of it is that history is a 'humanity' ... but also that it's because they didn't get the history either, and didn't have time to learn it well enough to teach it.) The physics department (major US university) actually hired a history of science scholar, and I heard grumbling that he should be paid for by another department.
roundsquare 17y ago
I suspect there is a compromise between an extreme use of history and ignoring it. In my physics class in high school, we discussed the progression of models of the atom. Each time, we learned what experiment led to the new thoughts, and how surprising it was. I thought this was a great way to learn the topic. We didn't, however, spend too much time on the history and never read any of the original papers. Note: We did have a great teacher. On the other hand, one difficulty with teaching topics historically is that it is hard to group things by topics. For example, in mathematics, the function is a relatively recent idea. Newton died before the function was thought up, but calculus is usually taught as "take the derivative of a function." This is not to say that history would be useless in this case, but it may require even more talent from the teacher.

plinkplonk 17y ago

"but you're still asking for a gifted teacher, and that's rare." Fair enough. Maybe a gifted teacher can write a book :-) "Again, not everything works for everyone." I agree. There are a lot of texts which ignore the history. It would be great to have a few which retraced the paths.

teeja 17y ago

Agreed. I'd have appreciated physics more if it had been taught with a more historical approach. When I asked the profs why, the general answer was 'takes too much time'. (I 'spect part of it is that history is a 'humanity' ... but also that it's because they didn't get the history either, and didn't have time to learn it well enough to teach it.) The physics department (major US university) actually hired a history of science scholar, and I heard grumbling that he should be paid for by another department.

roundsquare 17y ago

I suspect there is a compromise between an extreme use of history and ignoring it. In my physics class in high school, we discussed the progression of models of the atom. Each time, we learned what experiment led to the new thoughts, and how surprising it was. I thought this was a great way to learn the topic. We didn't, however, spend too much time on the history and never read any of the original papers. Note: We did have a great teacher. On the other hand, one difficulty with teaching topics historically is that it is hard to group things by topics. For example, in mathematics, the function is a relatively recent idea. Newton died before the function was thought up, but calculus is usually taught as "take the derivative of a function." This is not to say that history would be useless in this case, but it may require even more talent from the teacher.