Get rid of the physics 101 class

Get rid of the physics 101 class

As a physics major, I left it feeling awkward and incomplete.

It cant be taught properly since the non physics students dont know calculus so its done with awkward math. It doesnt teach you to derive the actual physics out of situations which is what the rest of your education is.

And lets be honest, the professors make their tests full of trickery and smugness.

This class is not a good learning environment. Absorb the material into each field and teach it with the class on the field...mechanics, electromagnetism, etc.

Thoughts?

Do you want people to kill themselves? A mechanics course without phy 101 would be suicidal for most people. Plus, I find the intuition of dimensional analysis very important to teach

>dont know calculus

It's your fault for taking the non-calculus based physics course.

>It doesnt teach you to derive the actual physics out of situations which is what the rest of your education is.

But it does.

>Absorb the material into each field and teach it with the class on the field...mechanics, electromagnetism, etc.

But that's what it is.
Uni Physics 1 = mechanics, basic theormo
Uni Physics 2 = electromagnetism, basic optics
Uni Physics 3 = basic SR, basic QM

There is nothing wrong with teaching physics without explicit calculus. The ideas of limits and tangents are important for motion, but these can be taught easily. Physics can be taught using finite time steps with all of the classical laws (moment, energy, angular momentum).

>t. algebra-based physics rockstar

>And lets be honest, the professors make their tests full of trickery and smugness.
This is so true. I'm a last semester senior in engineering right now, and for some reason the freshmen level introductory physics courses were by far the hardest classes I've taken.

At my uni they expect you to know calculus if you are taking phys 101 and if you dont you better learn in on your own time

What dumb school do you go to? Mine required Calc I/II as a pre-req for Phys I/II, unless you were in the baby physics for engineering tech and the like.

I agree with this sentiment, Physics 1 was literally my hardest class because the teacher decided to not teach out of a textbook but instead do some sort of "example problem" based teaching method where he didn't teach any core concepts or theorems but described everything in terms of examples

I wrote him a massive email complaining about his teaching method and describing how I'm not just a complainer, his method is just objectively bad for teaching. And then he decided to stop being a lecturer at the school soon after. Holy kek.

>being at a uni that doesn't require calc I before taking physics

wtf I had to wait a year because I was shit-tier and so had to do Calc I

I don't know if its like this everywhere but where i went there was a algebra based physics series for people getting fake degrees and then a calculus based series which was pretty good at making sure you knew how to derive everything. For some reason the professor had a hard on for deriving rotational inertia's of objects with non-uniform density.

>baby physics
most schools group engineers with science majors for physics you tard. There are ususally only 2 physics offered, the course for STEM majors and the courses for non-STEM.

Also the fact you don't know engineers take calc 1 and 2 shows how fucking retarded you are. Please stop larping as a college graduate/student. Go back to /r9k/ and fap to pokemon porn or something.

Take any math course. Take calc 2, calc 3, DiffEq, PDE, and they will ALL cover some kind of physics associated examples (all calculus-based). You can learn calc-based physics without taking calc-based physics. It's fucking annoying that all math courses are biased toward physics students.

It's biased because it's historical. Calculus was literally developed to answer physics questions.

Engineering tech is not engineering. I would know, I finished my BSEE in May.

While eng tech takes calc, at my school at least they take algebra-based physics.

In my physics 2 we went over basic QM. It was fucking rad.

Yeah my experience was similar with same book and masteringphysics shit. Was in calc based phys 1 and 2 with physics, math, premed, engineering majors etc and professors used calculus to derive shit and some hw used simple calculus, but on tests they just didnt use any so it was so easy. Physics 3 was more of the later chapters with some special and general relativity, nuclear, quantum, chaos theory, and some other shit Ive forgotten by now. Professor in this had no hw and only 1 midterm and final. Usually gave us a list of 10-20 derivations to learn because 1 would be on each exam. That class was interesting and wasnt dumbed down like 1 and 2 at least.

book is absolute ass

I have been teaching physics to three groups of students - basic course for what you would call STEM students (in Russia it's a bit different), a basic course for the rest, and (irrelevant here) a course on symplectic manifolds/symmetry for grads.

I can tell you one thing: none of these groups understand underlying maths. Most importantly, the students from applied math/CS with allegedly strong background have neither intuitive nor technical grasp on derivatives and integrals, let alone other concepts like cross product or determinant.

The calculus and linear algebra courses are completely out of sync with physics. I distinctly recall having the same problem 10 years ago where in my second month of uni I had to solve a physics problem by integrating something over a surface of revolution - I only knew how to do it because it was covered in high school (while others had no such strong background). As a physics professor, you have to find a remedy for this while still catching up with actual physics, it is a nightmare.

Bear in mind that here you cannot choose courses in Russia, you attend whatever you are told to.

But don't math students (and some CS students getting math minors) take an analysis course or two that covers the theory behind derivatives and integrals? By "neither intuitive nor technical grasp on derivatives and integrals, let alone other concepts like cross product or determinant", do you mean the theory and proving theorems and stuff like that (concepts you'd learn in upper-elective math courses) or just what a derivative is (rate of change of position = velocity, rate of change of velocity = acceleration, range of change of acceleration = jerk)? Isn't "integrating something over a surface of revolution" just calculus 3 (calculus in 3d)? Not sure what fundamentals you're referring to in your post.

>I left it feeling awkward and incomplete.

Sounds like my first sexual experience ( ._.)

Sorry to hear that comrade. The same issue exists in the US. Because schools don't teach the material anymore, they teach how to pass (cheat) tests. Students are woefully unprepared for college math & science since they have no conception of the material, they just search the material for what they think will be on the test.

Not him

Derivatives are rates of change. More specifically and usefully, they are rates of change at a certain point calculated, not explicitly, but by arbitrarily and repeatedly calculating its neighboring values.

This is an important concept in physics- that the world is so chaotic that limits are our best tool to understand it. Its a concept that repeatedly reappears all throughout physics. There is even an entire course dedicated to numerical methods of estimating neighbouring values.

But you wont hear about it in a phys101 class.

It's unfortunate. I meet people all the time in STEM programs who make jokes about how they didn't even have to use calculus in anything other than calc I and II as if that's something to be proud of.

>integrating something over a surface of revolution" just calculus 3
Of course, but it is studied after Lesbesgue theory (at least I did, the program hasn't changed much), which is not first semester, it's not even first year. Non-STEM seem to fail at math no matter the program.

The program and textbooks are horrid here, you at least have something colourful like Stewart's calculus.

>It cant be taught properly since the non physics students dont know calculus so its done with awkward math. It doesnt teach you to derive the actual physics out of situations which is what the rest of your education is.

What kind of clown college did you go to that taught physics I without calculus?

>and some CS students getting math minors

HAHAHAHAHAHA, no. CS students who get math minors do so to trick people into thinking they are good at math. They only take the math courses created for future public school teachers and learn nothing.

Some of my calc, physics, and upper level EE courses did not allow calculator so people couldnt cheat (easy to input text on graphing calculators). But some allowed Matlab and open book (more realistic approach)

This. The pure mathematician is a 20th century invention.

You are pretentious and a meme

Yes, that's a popular culture among college kids. There's a culture built around doing the least/seeing what you can get away with while still passing. It's considered desirable to be ignorant/uninvolved with your education. "I'm smart but I don't try."

They are going to be in for a shock when it comes time to actually put the material into practice and they realize they never learned it.

I'm getting a math minor and play to take ODEs, PDEs, Differential Geometry, Topics in Geometry, Fourier Analysis, and some other analysis courses

Classes get easier as you get more into the program because they assume you all study hard and are intelligent