Monday, August 29, 2011

Rearranging the deck chairs

The end of the school year seems to be getting increasingly crunched. I don't know if I'm moving too slowly or testing schedules are mucking up the works or what.

I remember a story on NPR where a noted skyscraper architect said that when trying to design a taller building, you must think not in terms of adding another level to the top, but adding another level to the bottom.

And so I decided that I needed to get to something physics-y sooner than I was. I had a "prelims" unit up first in Physics 1 to accommodate the revolving door of added and dropped students whose count rate is highest the first week and drops with a reasonable half-life until the first 20 days is up. The thought was to forestall the physics until student schedules settled down.

No more. While we still don't get to our first lab until the second week, I compressed the prelims stuff and combined it with my non-month-long unit on motion. That's right: I don't spend a month on motion. More like a week. Motion analysis is applied math. Good fun, and math we do in physics class. But not really physics. The kicker? The entire sky remains aloft; none of it falls!

Anyway, the result is some upheaval in my first and second units of Physics 1 (units 1.01 and 1.02). There will be some pain at phyz.org while the deck chairs get rearranged and appropriately modified. Let me know which links are broken and I will try to fix them. Such a rearrangement is not a trivial matter when there are so many moving parts.

Thank you for your patience!

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