Is it misleading to say "IN the universe"

[Sorcerer]

Okay, this is now a complaint (a valid one) about teaching philosophy and methods in school. Remember that few school children will really go on to study science at a higher level and that most teachers are not very highly educated in science. Some teachers will have PhD's, but generally teachers are not scientists. They do not necessarily themselves understand the cutting edge models.

 

The real problem is the 'dumbing down' of science at school level. Well, again I am not sure how we can really change this without loosing the children completely.

They lost me completely because they did dumb it down. Lucky it was all external exams, I'd just show up at the end of the year and get my A.

[ajb]

They lost me completely because they did dumb it down. Lucky it was all external exams, I'd just show up at the end of the year and get my A.

This seems to be a complaint about the school system and exams. Your comment is a fair comment in my opinion. School, and undergraduate studies I would also say, are about remembering enough to pass exams. This is across all subjects and not just science and mathematics. It is also true that there needs to be some shaping of the content to suit the age and abilities of the students.

 

I would say that we learn is pieces or stages. It takes time to build up these layers and each layer is inherently only part of the picture. Some details and methods and not included as these would only further confuse the students. I see this first hand in teaching mathematics to first year undergraduates. For example, I build up some constructions and results starting from what they know well already. I do not simply start lecture 1 with 'Let Vect be the category of all finite dimensional vector spaces over the field k'. Which would in hindsight be an okay place to start, but they do not understand the language or philosophy here. So I build it up slowly.

[jeffellis]

"In this universe" sounds better than "in the universe." I think our universe is one of many (perhaps hundreds of billions). I think our Big Bang was born from a collapsed star in another dimension or universe. I also think that our universe spins on an axis much like its counterpart (the black hole in its parent universe). I figure since so many celestial bodies spin, it could be due to a spinning universe.