I’d like to suggest an alternative learning model view, one less concerned with getting immediately an intimate and “true” understanding of the reality, and more focused on with progress through stages.
The first stage is awareness. When we are exposed to light theories, particle theory, wave theory, and later quantum theory, we clearly don’t know what a light particle is, so we attach verbal labels to ideas. This is not perfect, but allows us to learn the concepts and start thinking about it. Part of this process is “guessing the teacher password”. When we guess right routinely, that is we associate the right visual stimuli with the right verbal label, we are ready to go to the next stage.
The next stage is making some calculus and some predictions. Here we are deepening our understanding and our model of reality by adding some equations. Again, a process of learning at the end of which we clearly do not have a perfect or true understanding, but its better than the first stage as it allows us to do more.
The following stages are about refining our models and making them more accurate, better predictor and more useful for surviving (or getting a Nobel prize).
In the end, our thinking will always be constrained by our models we will probably never have a perfectly true understanding of light. But going throuhg school put us on the path on building progressively more elaborate and/or useful models to operate in the world.
I’d like to suggest an alternative learning model view, one less concerned with getting immediately an intimate and “true” understanding of the reality, and more focused on with progress through stages.
The first stage is awareness. When we are exposed to light theories, particle theory, wave theory, and later quantum theory, we clearly don’t know what a light particle is, so we attach verbal labels to ideas. This is not perfect, but allows us to learn the concepts and start thinking about it. Part of this process is “guessing the teacher password”. When we guess right routinely, that is we associate the right visual stimuli with the right verbal label, we are ready to go to the next stage.
The next stage is making some calculus and some predictions. Here we are deepening our understanding and our model of reality by adding some equations. Again, a process of learning at the end of which we clearly do not have a perfect or true understanding, but its better than the first stage as it allows us to do more.
The following stages are about refining our models and making them more accurate, better predictor and more useful for surviving (or getting a Nobel prize).
In the end, our thinking will always be constrained by our models we will probably never have a perfectly true understanding of light. But going throuhg school put us on the path on building progressively more elaborate and/or useful models to operate in the world.