Physics with Maths Teacher Training: A Bogus Good Idea?
After over two full weeks spent at university as a PGCE student, I was impatient to start at school and be confronted with the reality of students. Finally, this day has arrived! From now on, I will spend two days at university and three days at school per week, and from November onwards I’ll only have one day at university and four days at school.
On arrival at the school, all PGCE students are welcomed by the PCM (Partnership Coordinating Mentor). We hear about the history of the school and make a tour of the school’s premises. Afterwards, we go to our respective departments. There are three of us in science, and we are welcomed in the department by our three respective mentors. One of them, Nawar, is in charge of our timetables. My training ‘Physics with Maths’ is an issue because it implies I am de facto in two different departments: science and maths. It is a first logistical burden. The second one is that science lessons up to GCSE are usually given by a single teacher who teaches physics, chemistry and biology throughout the year. It is thus a further constraint to find classes that need to be taught a physics module in the period I am in the school. Obviously, this subject combination does not fit in the schools’ standard organisation. Nawar is extremely annoyed by my choice to teach physics with maths instead of ‘normal’ science.
Nawar tries to convince me that I should teach the three sciences during my training, as, she says, it is what I will eventually be doing. She says I should get exposure now to all the three sciences as having some shortcomings would be tolerated during the training, but not as a qualified teacher. I agreed to teach chemistry as I studied it for two years at university, and it overlaps with physics, so I feel comfortable teaching it. Conversely, I object that teaching biology on top of maths, physics and chemistry would mean adding a fourth subject, and one I have furthermore no idea of. That would be simply too much work in addition to all the rest (preparing and giving lessons, and university work). She just says “that’s teaching!” — her favourite catchphrase she would repeat over and over when one of the PGCE students would mention their tiredness and/or their work overload… On the whole, however, my feeling was that her true argument was ‘all science teachers have to teach the three sciences. It’s annoying for all of us, so why should you be able to avoid it?’
Another argument put forward by some in favour of science teachers teaching the three sciences is that you would supposedly teach better your non-speciality subject. The reason is that when preparing the lessons and discovering their content, you have to go through the same difficulties as your students, while in your speciality it has become so clear to you that you don’t anticipate students’ misconceptions and barriers to learning. It sounds sensible, but what about having the big picture of your subject, knowing where you want to bring your students on short and middle term, being able to simplify without introducing conceptual mistakes? As a matter of fact, I was given during my lesson observations many examples of teaching physics inaccurately. For instance, in one lesson about mass and weight, a chemistry teacher showed a picture on the board of a fat man in a tiny boat and asked, “What is more, his mass or his weight?” I understand that his aim was to make the students realise that mass and weight are different and have a different value. However, the question is not rigorous and is conceptually wrong. Imagine this question: “I walk at a speed of 2 m/s, so after 10 seconds, what is more, the time or the distance I walked?” It doesn’t make sense to say the time you walked is smaller than the distance you walked, does it? In this way the fundamental — but so often lacking — notion of ‘physical quantities’, that are closely linked to the use of measurement units, cannot be conveyed. Different physical quantities have different types of units. Time is not the same as distance, length is not the same as volume, and mass is not the same as weight — and so one uses different types of units: time units like seconds, hours or years for time, distance units like meter, centimetre, inch or light-year for distance, etc.
I also observed Nawar, a biology teacher, giving a physics revision lesson on classical mechanics for GCSE. She asked me to help her with the parts on kinetic and gravitational potential energy as her knowledge was rusty. She explained that velocity is “speed with direction” and so can take up negative values. One student asked afterwards how velocity can have a negative value, and Nawar replied “you know, something can be very fast or not so fast…” I am afraid she has some difficulties with the concept of vector, and it might well be that some students encounter the same difficulties. However, in the present case, I doubt that it enables her to teach it better than someone who masters this concept.
Many of my ‘physics with maths’ colleagues at university faced similar difficulties in their schools. Overall, schools seem to be reluctant to adapt their logistics to teachers with this new subject combination. I had an interview in a three-year-old academy, hoping that given that the school was new and expanding, they would be more open to new ways of functioning. However, even if the vice-principal seemed to understand my point (“So, you would be one week ahead of your students in biology but 20 years in physics”), they were clear that there was no way around teaching the three sciences. In this context, one can wonder why this training exists in the first place. I believe this was a response to the shortage of physics teachers. I suspect someone thought it could attract potential career changers into teaching. They realised that physicists would be discouraged by the prospect of teaching the three sciences, while teaching physics and maths would make much more sense to them, so they created this subject combination as a teacher training simply to lure them into teaching. Obviously, communication with schools to bring them onboard to this idea was either absent or ineffective, and nobody has seemed to even think that it could be actually an advantage for students (and schools) to have teachers proficient in both these subjects. Consequently, no school considered new ways of organising schedules to accommodate these new teachers. It was a measure to attract more physicists into teaching — and that’s all. Who cares about the fact that these physicists will eventually have to teach the three sciences? That’s the way it is — so please stop complaining. Actually, they might even teach the three sciences plus maths during their training — yeah, tough, but that’s teaching! And did you believe that your training provider (the university) would feel concerned with that issue? You are simply wrong — we told you, the purpose was to reach certain recruitment targets (and cash the university fees), the rest is not really relevant. However, given the difficulties schools are facing to retain their teachers in general, to recruit physics and maths teachers in particular, and to attract more students into post-16 physics (for which, as we will see in a next article, having physicists teaching physics is essential), I strongly believe they should consider any option to attract and retain more physicists in schools. And having teachers teaching physics and maths is one of them.
