It’s a variation on a classic Celtic joke which I’m sure that you’ve heard before, but here it is anyway.
Motorist: Can you tell me the way to Llanpumsaint please?
Welshman: Why yes, but I wouldn’t start from here if I were you…
I wouldn’t start from here. The joke, of course, is that we rarely have a choice of where we start from. We start from herebecausehere is where we are. Here is where we start from, there is no choice.
David Hammer (2000) in “Student Resources For Learning Introductory Physics” offers a fascinating perspective on the varied points that students start from as they begin to learn physics. He likens a student’s preexisting conceptual structures to the computational resources used by programmers. These conceptual resources inside our students’ heads can be (loosely) compared to “chunks of computer code”, if you will. He goes on to point…
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The Echo Chamber 