It is always a mixed pleasure for me to be asked to
describe my role in some activity that took place more
than a decade ago. On the one hand I enjoy the nostalgia
that accompanies any such venture. On the other hand it
is only then that I realize that my reconstruction of
events would have been far easier and infinitely more
reliable had the request been made when I still had a
functional memory. In any case, the request has been
made, and I've decided that my memory of those events is
more to the point than would be a research project to
ferret out what officially recorded facts might be
found.
As my memory has it, the time was somewhere during
the fall of 1956. Professor F. Wheeler Loomis, Head of
the University of Illinois Physics Department, was
approached by Professor Jerrold R. Zacharias, chairman
of a newly formed Steering Committee of a Physical
Sciences Study Committee (PSSC) that had been
established at MIT. That Steering Committee had a
membership of about twenty distinguished physics
teachers, active researchers and a number of highly
placed university and government administrators. Loomis
and Zacharias had worked together at the "Rad Lab" at
MIT during World War II and had developed a close,
working relationship. It was certainly that relationship
that led Zacharias to approach Loomis with a suggestion
that the latter might explore with his faculty the
possibility of collaboration between Illinois and MIT in
pursuing the ambitious goal that had been embraced by
his PSSC Steering Committee.
That goal was the creation of a new high school
physics course that would represent a no-holds-barred
alternative to the then-current high school course.
Loomis himself had always had a strong commitment to
strengthening the quality of the teaching of physics at
the college level, and he felt that the numbers and the
quality of students enrolled in college physics courses
could be significantly increased and enhanced by
improving the quality of high school physics courses and
teaching. .In responding to Zacharias Loomis agreed to
serve as chairman of a cooperating Illinois group if
there were sufficient interest in forming one. His own
enthusiasm was contagious.
Initially about a half a dozen individuals expressed
an interest in attending a December planning meeting at
MIT in order to get a better feel for the direction in
which the project was moving and to get some idea about
how an Illinois contingent might fit in. Our interest in
pursuing the matter further was motivated largely by a
deep dissatisfaction with the quality of high school
physics courses (textbooks, in particular) of that day.
(As I remember it, our "bête noire" in that era was a
widely used text book in which the frontispiece was a
picture of a steam shovel --- misguidingly suggesting
that that was an informative characterization of the
discipline of physics.) In those days there was a
general belief (justified by reality in many cases) that
the teaching of physics in high schools was relegated to
the care of any available staff member -- often, if not
usually, to the coach of a football, basketball or
baseball team.
Following the December meeting a few of us agreed to
spend the summer at MIT to participate in more detailed
discussions about the project in general and also in
some more sharply focused discussion of possible roles
for an Illinois group. By the end of the summer meeting
it was agreed by all that a multi-pronged approach would
be required to accomplish the major changes that were
felt to be necessary to bring the teaching of physics
more closely in touch with the reality of the status and
the ongoing progress of that discipline. To realize this
kind of improvement it was decided to give up the
standard packaging and ordering of the various parts of
standard physics curricula and to start the course with
a more fundamental look at space, time and measurement.
Not till the third of five parts of the new course does
the text address Newtonian mechanics.
The multi-pronged approach was envisioned to include,
first and foremost, a new textbook, and work on such a
book was already well advanced at MIT. In addition to
the new book (which would define a dramatically new
approach to the teaching of physics in high school)
there would also have to be invented a set of new,
inexpensive classroom demonstrations, new laboratory
experiments and it was decided that a set of movies
should be made to be stand-ins for demonstrations or
experiments too difficult or too expensive for the
average high school,. Those movies were to feature
currently active physicists as principal protagonists.
Somewhat independently an effort was to be made to
enlist the help of a number of distinguished physicists
to contribute to a series of small, paperback books
presenting their picture of their specialty or of their
favorite giant in the history of physics. (One of my
favorites was a biography of Galileo, authored jointly
by Laura Fermi, a one-time physics teacher herself, and
Gilberto Bernardini, an active worker in the field of
elementary particle physics.) Finally, Zacharias
realized that with adoption of the new course there
would likely be a disconnect between that course and the
then standard College Board Examinations. He initiated
conversations with the authors of those exams to arrange
for a different examination to be created for students
who had been taught physics the PSSC way.
As for the Illinois group, we decided that major
participation in continuing work on the text would be
difficult at a distance of 1,000 miles from the
principal authors at MIT. Rather it we felt that our
group, to work efficiently, should have a large measure
of autonomy so that our work could proceed as an almost
independent entity. We asked for and were assigned the
creation of a Teacher's Guide that would introduce a
teacher to the philosophy of the course and that would
attempt to give help to a neophyte teaching the course
for the first time. Homework problems that were devised
at MIT were sent to Illinois where solutions were worked
out and imbedded in the Teacher's Guide. Wheeler Loomis
chaired the start of that effort during 1957--'58.
I happened to have had a previous commitment to spend
that year in Italy on sabbatical leave. When I returned
to Urbana, I was taken by surprise when Loomis asked me
to take over the chairmanship of the Illinois group. The
group consisted of people who had very strong ideas of
how the course material should be presented. They were
independent-minded and liked to work independently.
Various chapters of the text were assigned to individual
members of the group, and they produced drafts of what
they thought was needed by a neophyte teacher. I
received all those drafts and tried to edit them into a
certain degree of uniformity. My rewrite of each chapter
was then passed back to all members of the group for
comments, corrections and new ideas. Those, in turn,
were passed back to me, and I forwarded them to MIT for
their consideration and comment. There was a continual
traffic of materials --- text book chapters from them to
us and Teacher's Guide chapters from us to them. Those
exchanges gradually led to a meeting of the minds and to
the preparation of two independent books.
Even before the first editions were published, drafts
were used at a number of schools where there were
"master teachers" who had been actively involved in the
production of the materials and who were ready to take
the plunge of teaching the new course. At Illinois we
were fortunate in finding a mathematician whose home was
in our College of Education, but who himself had, on the
one hand, some background in physics while, on the
other, he had experience in the creation of a
ground-breaking new math course, "The New Math", that
had been developed at Illinois several years earlier. He
taught the embryonic PSSC physics course at our
University High School. One or another member of our
group attended each of his classes at "Uni". We and he
fed his experiences, reactions, comments and advice to
the group at MIT. Our group was also fortunate in
having, as a colleague, Gilbert Findley, another member
of our College of Education and previously a teacher of
high school physics. He served as an adviser and editor
of our work while also serving as a liaison between the
PSSC and teachers trying out the PSSC materials.
With the "completion" of the Teacher's Guide" I felt
that the work of our group had reached a natural end.
Improving, editing and updating had to be a continuing
process, and a new corporation, Educational Services
Inc. had been created at MIT to take over those
functions. I ended my own involvement in the project.
Shortly afterwards I was unexpectedly called back for
one final, fascinating venture. A group of faculty
members at Makerere University in Uganda had learned of
the PSSC program and had asked that they be given the
PSSC materials and the training necessary to introduce
the new course to schools in Uganda. Zacharias decided
that it would not be wise to use PSSC materials in a
setting in which previous courses were not bringing
students up to a level of preparation adequate to enable
them to handle the PSSC materials. I was asked to go to
Uganda, to visit a cross section of schools and to
advise him whether or not such an experiment had a good
chance of succeeding. That I did, and it is a whole
story of its own. I was joined in Uganda by Francis
Friedman, the principal author of the PSSC textbook. All
I can report now is that I did not feel that the average
school in Uganda prepared students adequately for use of
the PSSC course. I believe that the requested help was
not immediately offered, but I also believe that several
years later that decision was reversed.
I soon became deeply engaged in my own research in
experimental elementary particle physics and lost direct
communication with the PSSC project.
