Classic Edition: GenEd Daydreams

Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It's probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn't have to teach introductory classical mechanics again...

This is as good an excuse as any for re-posting an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2004. I actually did one of these, in a very limited way-- I did one lecture of "How to Lie With Statistics" as part of a class on the election of 2004 (which got me on tv-- scroll up for grainy video). I still think it would make for an interesting class, if only...

p>Courses taught by any academic department at the college or university level can generally be divided into two categories: major requirements, and "general education" classes for non-majors. There's a slight grey area when it comes to physics, with the "physics for pre-meds" track being somewhat more difficult than the "physics for poets" level that most people associate with GenEd, but the basic division between classes for majors and classes for non-majors is pretty standard.

I haven't taught any GenEd classes other than the pre-med track at this point in my career, largely because the pre-med track is the main component of our GenEd program, at least on the physics side. The department offers a couple of very popular GenEd astronomy courses, but I'm not qualified to teach those, and the other classes are pretty well tied to the specific professors who made them up (including the team-taught course on "Nazi Science," which is an amusing thing to have turn up on a Google search).

I'm not likely to teach any GenEd courses in the next couple of years, and I'm definitely not going to propose a new class before I get tenure, but every now and then I get ideas for things that would make good GenEd courses. Lacking a more formal outlet for them, I might as well post them here:

How to Lie With Statistics. This would be a terrific course to offer this Fall, as an election year is what you might call a target-rich environment for a discussion of deceptive data handling. You probably wouldn't even need a textbook, just an Internet connection and Fox News Channel. Ideally, this would be team-taught with somebody from Political Science, or History, or Economics, to allow a full discussion of the corrosive effects of science abuse on policy-making. And you needn't restrict it to politics-- there's no shortage of data abuse in the fields of quack medicine.

(You might object that a course of this sort would more properly belong in the Math department, rather than Physics. I'm the one making these up, though, and anyway, there's a long and proud tradition of physicists as debunkers.)

A Brief History of Timekeeping. OK, it's a dreadful pun, but there's a lot of interesting science in clocks, clock-making, and time-keeping. You could start with astronomical methods (marking of equinoxes, sundials, etc.), move on to pendulum clocks and the importance of precise timekeeping for navigation (Longitude and all that), then an explanation of how atomic clocks work and what we get from that. Time permitting (heh), you could even throw in some bits of Special Relativity.

It would be hard to do right, but if you could pull it off, it would probably be Very Cool Indeed. Several years from now, I may give it a try.