One of the aspects of teaching that keeps me coming back for more is when the students say something so insightful that I ponder the ramifications long after the fact. One such jewel dropped from a student’s mouth when I was circulating around the room, helping my Physics students with their study guide in small groups. Inevitably, there was one group that just wasn’t focusing as well as the others. They had hardly started; so I sat down with them and reviewed the difference between vector quantities and scalar quantities.
Of times, science students get tripped up on vocabulary even if the concept behind the term is easily understandable. So, I repeated the definition of a vector quantity, which has both magnitude and direction. Then the next vocabulary pitfall was “magnitude.” Instead of simply telling them what the word meant, I gave them examples of magnitudes such as their age, shoe size, height, weight. For ten of the longest minutes of my teaching career, I attempted to get one of the four students to say the magic word that was synonymous with “magnitude.” At one point, a student confessed that he felt that I was trying to get them to describe the essence of the color orange. At the time, I thought the comment was so outlandish, I quickly dismissed it. A few minutes later, one brave soul carelessly said, “Numbers?”
I erupted, “Yes, yes, yes! Magnitudes are numbers! So scalar quantities, like your personal statistics, are represented only by a number and vectors such as displacement, acceleration, velocity and force have a number and a direction!”
The classroom was eerily quiet for a few moments, then the students collectively let out a sigh of relief and giggled at my temporary insanity. After class, my student’s magical phrase, “describing the essence of orange,” came back to intrigue me.
I thought I was giving clear, logical hints to lead my students toward the word “number,” but there was no connection to the pattern I wanted them to see. I loved that my student used an analogy about color since how would I describe orange or any other color to someone who had never seen color before?
I could have that person to taste the sweetness of a ripe orange. I could take that person outside during both the sunrise and sunset and let them feel the sun when it was that color, but could I reconcile those three experiences with the ESSENCE of orange? I could take the physics approach and talk about wavelength and how all the other colors are absorbed except the orange wavelength, which reflects into our eyes, making the object appear orange, but is that scientific explanation the essence?
In retrospect, I’m relieved that my job is merely teaching physics.