Notes on teaching physics to biologists

The article by Dawn Meredith and Joe Redish must come as a wake-up call to all those who have been teaching the algebra-based general physics taken mostly by biology and pre-med majors. I have been teaching calculus-based physics and algebra-based physics on and off for more than 30 years. No two groups of students learning the same concepts and approximately the same techniques could be more different.

In algebra-based physics, I started out teaching a watered-down version of the calculus-based physics and slowly graduated to include more of what the authors call “superficial” examples from biology and medicine. Including those examples produced no discernible response from the students.

Meredith and Redish call for a complete revision of the content to focus on the concerns and interests of biologists. They even want to eliminate a number of topics and concepts that are vital to physics at any level.

Two problems are endemic to physics intended for biology majors. The first is the method of learning. The biology majors I have taught are comfortable with memorizing and reproducing. They have never been trained to solve problems. They have a fantastic memory power, and there is no way to make use of it in a physics course. The second problem is an aggressive and obsessive quest for an A. I think the pathological anxiety about grades stands in the way of learning a difficult subject like physics.

Although pre-med students perceive that anything less than a 4.0 grade point average spells doom, mediocre students with a less-than-average GPA routinely get into medical schools.

The two problems cannot be magically eliminated by sacrificing what are considered to be difficult and “irrelevant” topics. Meredith and Redish’s example (box 4 in their article) of using scaling to determine how earthworms grow is interesting, and I will definitely use it in the future. However, it suggests a trend of replacing the existing physics for life-sciences majors with quantitative methods in biology.