Contract work comes to an end next week, so it looks like I'm free for the summer again. It was great last time - strolling to Monterey market, cooking, having coffee on Solano, walking in the hills... Life as it was meant to be lived. (Aside from the minor matter of tracking down my next gig.)
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Taking the Physics CSET
I've been thinking of moving on to a "next" career. This would be my third, if grad school and a brief postdoc count. My thought: high school physics teacher. I still read Physics Today as soon as it arrives, and whenever I find a good survey article on arxiv.org I read it. It's still a subject that animates me... Sam's newfound interest in physics helped to get me thinking in this direction too. (My last career, as a strategist and researcher for a hedge fund, turns out to have been spectacularly mis-timed, aside from misjudging the character of the person who hired me.) The timing of this one is probably questionable as well - the California propositions that would keep funding for schools from diving off a cliff look set to go down in flames next week, and the Governator promises deep cuts in pretty much everything as a result.
Anyway, one of the many hoops the state makes you jump through before you can be considered qualified to earn a pathetically small salary teaching the next generation is a "subject matter test" to certify your competency in the field you want to teach. (This is the least of the hoops - the bigger ones include a year or so of coursework and internship time.) So on Saturday I took the Physics CSET.
This consisted of 50 multiple choice questions plus 3 "structured response" questions where you have to write out your answer (and some poor shlub has to grade it). Most of the questions were pretty simple material that anyone who got a passing grade in college freshman mechanics and E&M could have answered (though some of the questions had distractors, like giving the mass of a pendulum bob in a problem to calculate the length of the wire required to get a specified period). Two questions jumped out at me, though - one E&M problem where I'm practically certain none of the offered answers were correct: they all had the wrong sign - and one on, of all things, the strong interaction!
I have no idea why this was in there - my first thought was that there must be some generality in the state standard about being able to describe the "four forces", but I couldn't find anything like that in the curriculum on the state website. The question basically asked which of four metaphoric descriptions was the best description of how the strong force works. Three of them were:
* It's like wet sand where the water makes the sand grains stick together
* It's like a series of filters with openings of different sizes [I have no clue what this is supposed to mean]
* It's like two people on a skating ring tossing a bowling ball back and forth
I can't remember the fourth. I think they were after the third - at least that's what I marked - but the first probably makes about as much sense, and none of them really are useful as metaphors (compared to, say, the metaphor of electric and magnetic "lines of force" which is so useful that people tend to think of them as real). The third one is something you sometimes hear in discussions of how forces arise from "virtual particles" (another metaphor), but it has the problem that it's very hard to understand how two opposite charges passing virtual photons back & forth can get pulled towards each other. The normal intuition from this picture would be that the momentum transfer will push them apart. There's a long discussion on the usenet Physics FAQ about this, but it's not at all straightforward. The whole point of metaphors in physics is to clarify for our intuitions the key features of the phenomenon. This one gets it exactly wrong.
One more oddity from the test. You can take more than one at the same sitting. But you get the same total time for one, two or three tests - up to five hours. I imagine that this is supposed to be "more than enough" even for three. I had writer's cramp after just the one. Then again, as the Firstborn never tires of reminding me, I'm old.
Update: I passed. But I'll never know if the bowling ball metaphor was what they were after...
Anyway, one of the many hoops the state makes you jump through before you can be considered qualified to earn a pathetically small salary teaching the next generation is a "subject matter test" to certify your competency in the field you want to teach. (This is the least of the hoops - the bigger ones include a year or so of coursework and internship time.) So on Saturday I took the Physics CSET.
This consisted of 50 multiple choice questions plus 3 "structured response" questions where you have to write out your answer (and some poor shlub has to grade it). Most of the questions were pretty simple material that anyone who got a passing grade in college freshman mechanics and E&M could have answered (though some of the questions had distractors, like giving the mass of a pendulum bob in a problem to calculate the length of the wire required to get a specified period). Two questions jumped out at me, though - one E&M problem where I'm practically certain none of the offered answers were correct: they all had the wrong sign - and one on, of all things, the strong interaction!
I have no idea why this was in there - my first thought was that there must be some generality in the state standard about being able to describe the "four forces", but I couldn't find anything like that in the curriculum on the state website. The question basically asked which of four metaphoric descriptions was the best description of how the strong force works. Three of them were:
* It's like wet sand where the water makes the sand grains stick together
* It's like a series of filters with openings of different sizes [I have no clue what this is supposed to mean]
* It's like two people on a skating ring tossing a bowling ball back and forth
I can't remember the fourth. I think they were after the third - at least that's what I marked - but the first probably makes about as much sense, and none of them really are useful as metaphors (compared to, say, the metaphor of electric and magnetic "lines of force" which is so useful that people tend to think of them as real). The third one is something you sometimes hear in discussions of how forces arise from "virtual particles" (another metaphor), but it has the problem that it's very hard to understand how two opposite charges passing virtual photons back & forth can get pulled towards each other. The normal intuition from this picture would be that the momentum transfer will push them apart. There's a long discussion on the usenet Physics FAQ about this, but it's not at all straightforward. The whole point of metaphors in physics is to clarify for our intuitions the key features of the phenomenon. This one gets it exactly wrong.
One more oddity from the test. You can take more than one at the same sitting. But you get the same total time for one, two or three tests - up to five hours. I imagine that this is supposed to be "more than enough" even for three. I had writer's cramp after just the one. Then again, as the Firstborn never tires of reminding me, I'm old.
Update: I passed. But I'll never know if the bowling ball metaphor was what they were after...
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