|
|
Article: Exploring Learning Communities in the Two-Year College (Or How I Learned to Love the Vector).
- Article from:
- Techniques
- Article date:
- May 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Association for Career and Technical Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
My physics colleague gives the cart a shove. It rolls down the track and collides with another cart. On the computer screen, this collision produces a graph. It doesn't mean much to me, but Stan, my colleague, looks at it and smiles. He doesn't just smile; he beams.
He traces the image on the screen lovingly with his finger and nods his head. "See that?" he asks, pointing to the spike in the graphs. "Isn't that neat?" We repeat the experiment a number of times. Each graph presents itself to him like a work of art, like a couplet from a poem.
I'm learning about the relationship between force and acceleration. "Most of our students," he says, "are ...