Lessons of modern physics. The first lesson tells about why physics is needed. What's wrong with physics in modern school Why you need to study physics message

Not only schoolchildren, but even adults sometimes wonder: why is physics needed? This topic is especially relevant for parents of students who at one time received an education that was far from physics and technology.

But how to help a student? In addition, teachers can assign an essay for homework in which they need to describe their thoughts about the need to study science. Of course, it is better to entrust this topic to eleventh graders who have a complete understanding of the subject.

What is physics

In simple terms, physics is Of course, nowadays physics is moving more and more away from it, going deeper into the technosphere. Nevertheless, the subject is closely connected not only with our planet, but also with space.

So why do we need physics? Its task is to understand how certain phenomena occur, why certain processes are formed. It is also advisable to strive to create special calculations that would help predict certain events. For example, how did Isaac Newton discover the law of universal gravitation? He studied an object falling from top to bottom and observed mechanical phenomena. Then he created formulas that really work.

What sections does physics have?

The subject has several sections that are studied generally or in depth at school:

• Mechanics;
• vibrations and waves;
• thermodynamics;
• optics;
• electricity;
• the quantum physics;
• Molecular physics;
• nuclear physics.

Each section has subsections that examine various processes in detail. If you don’t just study theory, paragraphs and lectures, but learn to imagine and experiment with what is being discussed, then science will seem very interesting, and you will understand why physics is needed. Complex sciences that cannot be applied in practice, for example, atomic and nuclear physics, can be considered differently: read interesting articles from popular science magazines, watch documentaries about this area.

How does the item help in everyday life?

In the essay “Why is physics needed” it is recommended to give examples if they are relevant. For example, if you are describing why you need to study mechanics, then you should mention cases from everyday life. An example would be an ordinary car trip: from a village to a city you need to travel along a free highway in 30 minutes. The distance is about 60 kilometers. Of course, we need to know at what speed it is best to move along the road, preferably with some time to spare.

You can also give an example of construction. Let's say when building a house you need to correctly calculate the strength. You can't choose flimsy material. A student can conduct another experiment to understand why physics is needed, for example, take a long board and place chairs at the ends. The board will be located on the backs of the furniture. Next, you should load the center of the board with bricks. The board will sag. As the distance between the chairs decreases, the deflection will be less. Accordingly, a person receives food for thought.

When preparing dinner or lunch, a housewife often encounters physical phenomena: heat, electricity, mechanical work. To understand how to do the right thing, you need to understand the laws of nature. Experience often teaches you a lot. And physics is the science of experience and observation.

Professions and specialties related to physics

But why does someone who graduates from school need to study physics? Of course, those who enter a university or college majoring in the humanities have virtually no need for the subject. But in many areas science is required. Let's look at which ones:

• geology;
• transport;
• electricity supply;
• electrical engineering and instruments;
• medicine;
• astronomy;
• construction and architecture;
• heat supply;
• gas supply;
• water supply and so on.

For example, even a train driver needs to know this science in order to understand how a locomotive works; a builder must be able to design strong and durable buildings.

Programmers and IT specialists must also know physics in order to understand how electronics and office equipment work. In addition, they need to create realistic objects for programs and applications.

It is used almost everywhere: radiography, ultrasound, dental equipment, laser therapy.

What sciences is it related to?

Physics is very closely interconnected with mathematics, since when solving problems you need to be able to convert various formulas, carry out calculations and build graphs. You can add this idea to the essay “Why you need to study physics” if we are talking about calculations.

This science is also connected with geography in order to understand natural phenomena, be able to analyze future events, and the weather.

Biology and chemistry are also related to physics. For example, not a single living cell can exist without gravity and air. Also, living cells must move in space.

How to write an essay for a 7th grade student

Now let's talk about what a seventh grader who has partially studied some sections of physics can write. For example, you can write about the same gravity or give an example of measuring the distance he walked from one point to another in order to calculate the speed of his walking. A 7th grade student can supplement the essay “Why is physics needed” with various experiments that were carried out in class.

As you can see, creative work can be written quite interesting. In addition, it develops thinking, gives new ideas, and awakens curiosity about one of the most important sciences. Indeed, in the future, physics can help in any life circumstances: in everyday life, when choosing a profession, when getting a good job, during outdoor recreation.

Why does every person need to study physics at school?

Physics is needed in order to get acquainted and learn different ways of understanding nature. Then this can be transferred not only to nature. But physics shows how you can study something, how to pose questions. Posing a question is probably the most important thing that physics teaches in school.

Knowledge of the physical laws of the structure of our world is one way or another useful to any person. This is the same part of the general cultural basis as knowledge of the basic rules of the Russian language, as orientation in geography or history, as the ability to count money, as familiarity with the general principles of biological evolution...

And, by the way, people need to be taught physics so that they master a certain new style of thinking - model thinking. Mathematics develops the logical side of thinking, and physics makes it possible to think model-wise. That is, a person must understand: a phenomenon is happening - what is important there, what is not important.

The fact is that physics, the teaching of physics at school, is not aimed at communicating useful information, but at human development. And physics is an extremely convenient tool for this... And the fact that mathematics and physics are not really needed in the life of a normal person later, well, thank God. If a person has developed intelligence, and then he forgot how to solve some equation, then he has not lost anything in life.

Intelligence is not so much memory, attention, speed reading, knowledge of languages, etc., it is, first of all, ability to think !

Physics educates people who can analyze, generalize, draw conclusions - think! The Internet has been developing successfully for a long time. And, thank God, its resources do not yet know how to think, but only know how to look for information in it. And it will take much less time! So what then is the power of people? And if they are not trained to think, then they won’t be able to do anything... Computers with their crazy speed even when trying out options, not to mention using heuristic techniques, can only lose to a person who knows how to think. And you need to learn this!

Students, and sometimes their parents, say: “My child is a humanist, he draws (dances, sings) great, he doesn’t need physics at all.” The eternal debate between physicists and lyricists. Science and art. These areas of our culture are often considered almost as antipodes: in science - calculation and logic, in art - feelings and emotions; Science thinks, art experiences. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin, the difference is only in emphasis. The poet Alexey Sissakin said this very accurately and succinctly.

Science is dead without art,

It makes her feel better.

Art is meaningless without science:

Masterpieces are created by both mind and hands

We are starting a series of articles about problems and outdated concepts in the school curriculum and invite you to speculate about why schoolchildren need physics, and why today it is not taught as we would like.

Why does a modern schoolchild study physics? Either so that he does not get bored by his parents and teachers, or so that he can successfully pass the Unified State Exam of his choice, score the required number of points and enter a good university. There is another option that a schoolchild loves physics, but this love usually exists somehow separately from the school curriculum.

In any of these cases, teaching is carried out according to the same scheme. It adapts to the system of its own control - knowledge must be presented in such a form that it can be easily verified. This is why the GIA and Unified State Examination systems exist, and preparation for these exams as a result becomes the main goal of training.

How does the Unified State Exam in Physics work in its current version? The exam tasks are compiled using a special codifier, which includes formulas that, in theory, every student should know. This is about a hundred formulas for all sections of the school curriculum - from kinematics to atomic nuclear physics.

Most of the tasks - about 80% - are aimed specifically at applying these formulas. Moreover, other solution methods cannot be used: if you substituted a formula that is not in the list, you will not receive a certain number of points, even if the answer is correct. And only the remaining 20% ​​are comprehension tasks.

As a result, the main goal of teaching is to ensure that students know this set of formulas and can apply them. And all physics comes down to simple combinatorics: read the conditions of the problem, understand what formula you need, substitute the necessary indicators and just get the result.

In elite and specialized physics and mathematics schools, education, of course, is structured differently. There, as in preparing for all kinds of Olympiads, there is some element of creativity, and the combinatorics of formulas becomes much more complex. But what we are interested in here is the basic physics program and its shortcomings.

Standard tasks and abstract theoretical constructs that an ordinary student should know very quickly disappear from the mind. As a result, after graduating from school, no one knows physics anymore - except for that minority who for some reason are interested in it or need it as a specialty.

It turns out that science, the main goal of which was to understand nature and the real physical world, in school becomes completely abstract and removed from everyday human experience. Physics, like other subjects, is taught by rote learning, and when in high school the amount of knowledge that needs to be learned increases sharply, it becomes simply impossible to memorize everything.

Visually about the “formula” approach to learning.

But this would not be necessary if the goal of learning was not the application of formulas, but understanding the subject. Understanding is, ultimately, much easier than cramming.

Form a picture of the world

Let’s see, for example, how Yakov Perelman’s books “Entertaining Physics” and “Entertaining Mathematics” work, which were read by many generations of schoolchildren and post-schoolers. Almost every paragraph of Perelman’s “Physics” teaches you to pose questions that every child can ask himself, starting from elementary logic and everyday experience.

The problems that we are asked to solve here are not quantitative, but qualitative: we need not to calculate some abstract indicator like efficiency, but to think about why a perpetual motion machine is impossible in reality, whether it is possible to shoot from a cannon to the moon; you need to conduct an experiment and evaluate what the effect of any physical interaction will be.

An example from “Entertaining Physics” of 1932: the problem of Krylov’s swan, crayfish and pike, solved according to the rules of mechanics. The resultant (OD) should drag the cart into the water.

In a word, it is not necessary to memorize formulas here - the main thing is to understand what physical laws the objects of the surrounding reality obey. The only problem is that knowledge of this kind is much more difficult to objectively verify than the presence in a schoolchild’s head of a precisely defined set of formulas and equations.

Therefore, for an ordinary student, physics turns into dull cramming, and, at best, into some kind of abstract mind game. Forming a holistic picture of the world in a person is not at all the task that is de facto performed by the modern education system. In this respect, by the way, it is not too different from the Soviet one, which many tend to overestimate (because before, they say, we developed atomic bombs and flew into space, but now we only know how to sell oil).

In terms of knowledge of physics, students after graduating from school now, as then, are divided into approximately two categories: those who know it very well, and those who do not know it at all. With the second category, the situation especially worsened when the teaching time for physics in grades 7-11 was reduced from 5 to 2 hours per week.

Most schoolchildren really don’t need physical formulas and theories (which they understand very well), and most importantly, they are not interesting in the abstract and dry form in which they are presented now. As a result, mass education does not perform any function - it only takes up time and effort. For schoolchildren - no less than for teachers.

Attention: The wrong approach to teaching science can have devastating consequences.

If the task of the school curriculum was to form a picture of the world, the situation would be completely different.

Of course, there should also be specialized classes where they teach how to solve complex problems and deeply introduce theory, which no longer intersects with everyday experience. But it would be more interesting and useful for an ordinary, “mainstream” student to know by what laws the physical world in which he lives works.

The matter, of course, does not boil down to schoolchildren reading Perelman instead of textbooks. The approach to teaching needs to change. Many sections (for example, quantum mechanics) could be removed from the school curriculum, others could be shortened or revised, if not for the ubiquitous organizational difficulties and the fundamental conservatism of the subject and the educational system as a whole.

But let us dream a little. After these changes, perhaps, overall social adequacy would have increased: people would have less faith in all sorts of torsion swindlers speculating on “protecting the biofield” and “normalizing the aura” with the help of simple devices and pieces of unknown minerals.

We already observed all these consequences of a vicious education system in the 90s, when the most successful scammers even took advantage of considerable sums from the state budget, and we see them now, although on a smaller scale.

The famous Grigory Grabovoi not only assured that he could resurrect people, but also diverted asteroids from the Earth with the power of thought and “extrasensory diagnosed” government aircraft. He was patronized not by anyone, but by General Georgy Rogozin, deputy head of the Security Service under the President of the Russian Federation.

Often schoolchildren (and especially schoolgirls) ask their parents and teachers the question: “Why should I study physics if it is not interesting to me and will not be useful to me at all in life?”

I offer you a simple answer. After all, motivation when studying a particular subject is a very important thing. Indeed, how to explain to a teenager who is not interested in physics, who is not going to associate a profession with it, that he needs to learn all these formulas, laws and theories?

In my opinion, knowledge of the physical laws of the structure of our world is one way or another useful to any person. This is the same part of the general cultural basis as knowledge of the basic rules of the Russian language, as orientation in geography or history, as the ability to count money, as familiarity with the general principles of biological evolution...

Knowing the basics of physics, we understand a bunch of things: how a car engine works, why a rocket flies in space, why an iron ship doesn’t sink, why a parachutist needs a parachute, what controlled thermonuclear fusion is, how a pump or an electric kettle works... Yes, it’s quite possible to live without this knowledge . But still…

And there is another important point. Almost all current high school students and high school students will, after some time, become parents, fathers and mothers. And their little children will ask a million questions: why is the trolleybus going? why is there a rainbow? Why does a water strider run easily on the surface of the water and not drown? Why is there thunder? Why is there weightlessness in space? Why can’t you stick your fingers into a socket, but you can use a plug from a table lamp? why is the light on? why are snowflakes all so different?...

All these children's questions will have to be answered. If you once understood the essence of the matter well enough at school, then even after 10-20 years you will easily be able to explain all such things to a child of preschool or primary school age - briefly and taking into account his level of understanding.

Of course, studying all these physics formulas, problems and experiments that are part of the standard school curriculum represents a much more in-depth level of physics learning than most students will need in the future. But the trick is that only in this way can the essence of physical laws be well understood. Well, how can you understand Archimedes’ law or the law of universal gravitation if you don’t solve at least a little of the corresponding problems?

It is clear that not all high school students will be inspired by the thoughts I expressed in this article... But maybe someone will be inspired. Or, at least, they will give you the strength and patience to study physics a little more diligently, without excessive disgust.

That's the idea. Think about it. And in your own interpretation, present it to your child or your students. Experience shows that such conversations have to be had repeatedly. It seems to me that to some extent they are useful.