PAPERS ON PHYSICS 285 



SOME PRACTICAL PROJECTS IX TEACHING 

 PHYSICS 



Prof. C. F. Phipps. 



Northern Illinois State Teachers College, 



DeKalb. III. 



Physics deals with so many things connected with our 

 home, school and community life, that if it is presented in a 

 practical, rather than the usual cut-and-dried way, it is both 

 interesting and instructive to our youth. Half a century 

 ago there were fewer inventions and up to date conveni- 

 ences, so the people of both city and farm were able to be- 

 come acquainted with the limited number of things belong- 

 ing to the field of science. The few conveniences then were 

 leaimed easily at home, and the people were relatively more 

 efficient than now. But inventions during the last half cen- 

 tury* have multiplied so rapidly that the home has been 

 unable to keep up with them, so that the burden of making 

 our youth efficient has fallen more and more upon our 

 schools and colleges. These institutions as a whole are 

 failing in much of this efficiency work. 



Listen to some of the adverse criticisms of science teach- 

 ing that are offered: "School work, especially in science, 

 is too artificial — not real." "Most of the science subject- 

 matter taught remains unused, both in and out of school 

 and college hours and in after school years." "The big 

 problem of the school is that there is very little relation- 

 ship between the work of the school and the work ot the 

 world." "Our physics books are too much on the order 

 of encyclopedias or dictionaries, and their proper function 

 is for reference only." "We lack books for high school 

 and college which present science as li\ing projects." 

 "The basic error in science teaching today is that it does 

 not center itself about the interests and desires of the stu- 

 dents." 



One of the professors in Columbia Teachers College asks 

 and answers this question : "WTiy do we, as mature peo- 

 ple, go to the literature of the automobile company to learn 

 about the workings and methods of repairing of our bat- 

 teries, and to make other repairs, rather than to a physics 



