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Why Do We Teach 'Physics For Poets' But Not 'Poetry For Physicists'?

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An article on the Chronicle of Higher Education crossed my social media feeds this week with the headline Math Gets a Makeover, describing a number of attempts to reformulate math classes in a way that makes them more appealing to non-mathematicians. Many of these classes sound appealing and useful, but as always, I find I'm ambivalent about the whole idea of these sorts of targeted classes. On the one hand, they can be a lot of fun, but I worry at times that they just end up amplifying the dangerous message that math and science are only for a narrow elite who can handle them.

To be clear, I think that in a lot of ways, these reformulated math classes sound great-- they sound better than the math classes I remember, back in the day, and I probably would've enjoyed taking them. Putting math into a clear and useful context is a great idea, and the lack thereof always bothered me (and continues to bother me to this day, when I have to teach from books that short the context in favor of extra math; at least now, I can do something about it). These are ideas that ought to be incorporated into the teaching of all math and science courses, including those for future math and science majors.

I have some hesitation about the whole concept of "Math for Liberal Arts" and "Physics for Poets" classes in general. Starting with the fact that there's more than a little paternalism in the idea that we can decide what constitutes "all these students will need" when it comes to math and science. There's a bit of danger in steering students who could handle more toward classes that deliver less, just because of the college-major plans expressed by an 18-year-old showing up on campus for the first time.

More than that, though, I'm concerned that too much adjusting of math and science courses to make them more congenial to arts majors risks losing the whole point of requiring those courses in the first place.

(And I'll note up front that I'm not saying that the specific courses discussed in the Chronicle piece are falling into this trap-- I haven't taken them, or reviewed their syllabi in detail. I'm talking about a very general concern I have about the way academia works; the article above is just a jumping-off point.)

The strongest argument for a broad, liberal education is that it exposes students to a range of the many different approaches humans have taken to trying to make sense of the world. The phrase "ways of knowing" gets thrown around a lot by people advocating for requiring students to take arts and literature classes,and it's not a terrible way to frame the discussion. I've written about this kind of thing here in the past, advocating for all college students to take science classes, and for scientists to take arts and literature classes.

The point of having students take courses in a wide range of disciplines, then, is to get some exposure to the mindset of each of these disciplines. We make our physics majors take math classes from math faculty, and English classes from English faculty not because we can't teach those subjects ourselves. In fact, we're perfectly capable of teaching all the math that's absolutely required to do physics ("Math Methods" courses already show up in a lot of physics curricula), and we could run technical writing courses to make our majors better writers. There's even a case to be made that this would be more efficient, particularly on the writing front, as there are enough differences between the writing style preferred in literary academia and that used in the sciences that we spend a lot of time un-teaching bad habits learned on the other side of campus.

We require our majors to take those courses in their "home" departments not for any practical reason related to our major requirements, but because it's good for them to get a look at the mindset of those disciplines. I'm co-teaching our "Integrated Math and Physics" course this term, and being reminded regularly that there are huge differences between the way a physicist approaches math and the way a mathematician approaches math. And, of course, there's a huge difference in the way a physicist approaches reading and writing and the way an English Lit professor does.

My worry with "Physics for Poets" and the analogous targeted math classes is that trying too hard to make science and math more appealing, we risk losing the mindset aspect that's the whole point of a liberal education. The abstraction and formality that rank high among the complaints about introductory math and science classes are also an essential part of the worldviews of these subjects. The mathematical approach to the world is rooted in rigorous formal logic and exacting standards of proof (one of my stock jokes when I need to do derivations is that I'm presenting a physicist's idea of a proof, which is a just a plausibility argument followed by an assertion that this is a general solution). The physics approach to the world, as I've written about before is rooted in approximating away complexity to find the simplest possible solution. The resulting formality and abstraction isn't an annoyance that can be pushed aside to make the subject more appealing, it's the whole point, or at least a large fraction of the point of making students take classes in those subjects.

The response to this is generally of the form, "Well, some students Just Aren't Math People," and thus need to be accommodated. Looking at the core of liberal education in terms of mindsets, though, this really boils down to "Some students don't find this way of thinking about the world congenial." But that's not really a valid argument for excusing them from having to do it. Or, to turn things around a bit, most of the arguments deployed in favor of "Physics for Poets" are, in terms of mindset, equally valid as arguments for offering targeted "Poetry for Physicists" courses.

After all, just as the mathematical approach to the world is rooted in formal logic, and the physics approach in simplifying abstraction, the literary-academic approach to the world is rooted in ambiguity. The essential core of the study of art and literature is the idea that words and images have meaning that goes beyond the surface appearance, and that that meaning is contingent on a whole host of external factors. The same surface text can be interpreted in radically different ways by scholars coming from different perspectives, and that's not a bug, but an essential feature of the system.

This is a mindset of its own, and one that is just as profoundly uncomfortable for many who find the mathematical and scientific mindsets more congenial as the mathematical approach is for those of a more literary bent. This is the root cause of most of the inter-disciplinary sniping of the "Science Wars" and eye-rolling from scientists about "postmodernism" and the like. It's also led to no end of grumbling in my office from students who resent having to take literature classes that they consider a waste of their time.

To the extent that the discomfort some students have with formal logic and abstraction is reason to tailor math and science classes to be more congenial to their mindset, then, the discomfort of my physics-major advisees with the ambiguity of arts and literature are an argument that we should be doing "Poetry for Physicists" classes. We should work to put literary analysis in a practical context, and ease scientifically-minded students into the idea of deeper textual interpretation and ambiguity.

We don't do this, of course, for a variety of reasons, many of them stupid. One of the few good reasons is that a mindset that embraces ambiguity is something useful for scientists to see and explore a bit. By the same token, though, the more rigorous and abstract scientific mindset is something that is equally worthy of being experienced and explored by the more literarily inclined. A world in which physics majors are more comfortable embracing divergent perspectives, and English majors are more comfortable with systematic problem solving would be a better world for everyone.

Now, I don't really think we need to be doing "Poetry for Physicists" classes (though I have occasionally thought that it might be a fun thing to try...)-- physics majors can suck it up and take literature classes. I do worry, though, that a system where we bend over backwards to accommodate one sub-group of mindsets in their encounters with another sends a bad message. Insisting on the need for "Physics for Poets" while not offering "Poetry for Physicists" sends the message that poets are regular people, while physicists are a breed apart, and that's not healthy for either poets or physicists.

I don't think we really need "Poetry for Physicists," but I also question whether we really need "Physics for Poets." It would be better, I think, to incorporate the useful ideas coming out of reform efforts in STEM fields into the general introductory courses, to make them more appealing for everyone, and teach all our students that science is a universal human activity in exactly the same way that art and literature are.

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