More Than Texts Need Reform in Middle Schools

Among the many well-taken points in John Hubisz’s article was one less compelling. In box 1 of the article, the answer to the oft-heard lament “Is it too much to ask that middle-school students develop the habit of consulting a dictionary?” should be “yes.” Learning science is sufficiently challenging without continual interruptions, and even more difficult is to know what you don’t know: Many physics words and names have idiosyncrasies of which young students can hardly be expected to be aware.

Adding pronunciation keys to the difficult words is a practice that might fruitfully be followed by textbook publishers. A few diacritics don’t take up much space and don’t detract from sentence flow or meaning, but do give the reader a frisson of distinction—that physics words and names are interesting and different! How better to convey the international scope of the physics enterprise than to teach students that “Planck” is pronounced differently from the experimental apparatus for determining mechanical advantage? Pronouncing words and names as if they were English sets students up for embarrassment.

I experienced such discomfort the first time I said “heterodyne” out loud in front of people who were experienced enough to know which syllable got the accent, but were insufficiently genteel to correct me privately. If students are embarrassed whenever they talk physics, they may be driven to philosophy and spend their days pondering So-crātes.