Robert sent this email:
Hi Ben,
I just wanted to share a comment I came across in a German-English forum I visit. Someone asked for a translation of the name of the equation for velocity = distance x time. One of the replies used standard American terminology, substituting the word “rate” for “velocity”. A contributor noted the inaccuracy of the word “rate”. A link to a website for teaching the equation showed that “rate” is standard terminology. Then the following was posted:
“And that’s the reason why students coming into physics courses at university have to unlearn all the imprecise and misleading concepts and terminology they had been fed in recipe-based high-school classes before they can start understanding and appreciating the science framework explaining the world around us. Deplorable. But that’s off topic…”
The phrase in the reply that I really liked was “recipe-based high-school classes”. Isn’t that a great description for many of the classes, especially the ones that are “scripted”. Sometimes I get the impression that teachers and administrators alike are looking for the right “recipe” of classroom management, strategies, framework, and assessment to insure an acceptable “academic performance index” score and achieve “rigor”. Unfortunately, the recipe is for the wrong thing – and then they wonder why the “product” isn’t what they were looking for.
Robert