Indoctrinated Physics
Studying physics according to the Indian Education System is much different from how it should normally be taught. Physics is a highly conceptual subject, and not everyone has that knack for understanding and visualizing complex concepts easily. But this is India we are talking about. Every child who has to select their subject stream is usually forced to choose the Science Stream from external pressure, and it doesn’t matter whether the subjects taught align with their interests.
Hence, Science subjects are seen as very difficult, not because it actually is, but because most of the students who study it have no interest in the subject but what it provides, namely — the examination scores, career opportunities and the other reasons provided to them by their parents, which they blindly agree with.
Physics is a conceptual subject. But in the Indian system the conceptuality is introduced as an additional difficulty and a fear is created among students. Schools mostly focus on the applications of those concepts rather than the concepts themselves. How can someone apply the concepts properly without understanding the concepts themselves?
In every chapter of an Indian physics textbook, a recurring pattern can be seen. A pattern that encourages the students to learn each chapter in the same way, which I’d like to split into three phases.
Phase One is the derivation phase. Each chapter has from five to fifteen individual derivations, each deriving a certain quantity. This phase is approached by the students in a slightly different way. Rather than being seen as a way to understand how those different expressions are obtained, it is seen as different long answer questions waiting to be blindly absorbed. “The longer the question the more marks they can be asked in an examination for.” is the common sentiment.
Phase Two is the numerical phase. This is the most heavily emphasized phase since it is the most application based. Almost sixty to seventy percent of a question paper focuses on testing the student’s calculation speed and skills rather than… well… physics. In this phase, the Indian student usually solves pages and pages of problems drilling the formulas required to solve these problems into their brain. What does the formula mean? Who cares? As long as they remember which formula to use in each problem, they are content.
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Before moving to the third phase, I would like to call attention to the unnecessarily excessive use of arithmetic operations in subjects like physics and chemistry. Arithmetic is one of the most important skills to exist and that is why it is taught since a child is capable of learning. But putting teenagers through excess arithmetic tests is only being done by physics and chemistry numericals in the Indian education system. Ironically, even mathematics being taught in these grades have less hardcore arithmetic in them.
Many numericals from physics involve finding the variable using a pretty simple formula, but finding the numerical value of this variable involves multiplying a three-digit number with a four-digit number and then dividing the obtained product with another three-digit number.
It’s pretty clear that schools should start allowing the use of calculators, but some schools instead ask the students to use a logarithm table to do tedious arithmetic (which most students don’t even bother to learn to use), which just is not very practical.
Phase Three is the conceptual understanding. This is what most students consider to be the most difficult, since this is what involves the most physics. This phase involves reading textbooks and understanding diagrams, which can be pure hell for those students without the knack for understanding concepts. Instead of prioritizing these conceptual questions, they are introduced in a way that makes them seem as a way to only add difficulty. Schools often train students to associate conceptual questions not with understanding, but with a threat to their examination performance.
Even the physics teachers I have been taught by antagonize these conceptual questions as if they are some kind of new evil way to torture the students. Conceptual questions should be the priority as fundamentally, learning physics without learning these concepts is impossible.
Now, for a system that focuses heavily on application of concepts, the practical experiments being done in the school laboratory should be what the students are trained to be good at, right? What confuses me is the sheer amount of rote memorization in these laboratory classes. In every school, the students are taken to the school’s laboratory and are made to do a different experiment every week. Let me take finding the electromotive force of an electric cell using a Potentiometer as an example. There is no explanation from the teacher on why we do this experiment, what a potentiometer even does and how it works. Students are just expected to learn the circuit diagram without any conceptual clarity, connect the circuit and calculate the value for electromotive force.
It is also to be noted that calculators are not allowed in the lab either, even though calculations can involve numbers with up to four significant figures making the students spend more time doing arithmetic. During the laboratory examination, students are expected to learn around twenty circuit diagrams and the format in which the procedure for all the experiments is written. Most students prefer to swallow pages of notes without understanding what is in them.
In conclusion, after some brief analysis it becomes clear that an education system which fails to spread interest in subjects and rewards those who blindly absorb large amounts of information and brute force derivations and numericals by spending an unnecessarily large amount of time can never prepare its students to compete with those who prioritize logical reasoning and understanding the subject. Until then, the only driving force for these students to study are those sweet marks.
