Editorial: Are Teaching and Research
Still Complementary?
Thomas D. Rossing
Traditionally, being a physics teacher has meant having the opportunity
both to do physics and to teach physics. In my own career I am grateful
for having been able to devote time and energy to both facets of our
profession and never had to make a choice between teaching and research.
A few years ago, in a guest editorial "The teacher/researcher:
An endangered species?" [American Journal of Physics 59, 487 (1991)],
I pointed out that there are rather strong forces pulling physics teachers
away from the traditional dual role of teacher and researcher. Young
faculty members at many large universities are given the impression
that tenure and promotion depend almost entirely on their success in
research (measured all too often not by the quality of their publications
but rather by the amount of outside funding they are able to attract).
Innovative teaching, they are led to believe, is something you put
off at least until you achieve tenure. Faculty members at many liberal
arts colleges facing tight budgets are given heavy classroom teaching
loads and little time or monetary support for research, even when it
involves students.
It was therefore reassuring for me to serve two years on the selection
committee for the APS Prize to a Faculty Member for Research in an
Undergraduate Institution and to learn about the impressive research
records of the nominees for this prize. It was almost an impossible
task to single out the most outstanding candidate each year. Not only
did these teachers have impressive records of publications, but they
had closely involved undergraduate students in their research. I knew
several of the candidates to be dedicated and outstanding teachers,
and it is probably safe to assume that all of them were. So at least
at undergraduate institutions, it appears that teaching and research
are successfully coexisting and complementing each other, as they have
traditionally done.
As I pointed out in my previous editorial, "teaching" physics
and "doing" physics take on different meanings in different
types of institutions. Doing physics at a large research university
means original research and frequent publication of the results in
scholarly journals; teaching physics includes being a mentor to graduate
students as well as introducing freshmen in general physics courses
to the excitement of physics. At a high school, doing physics might
mean figuring out how a sophisticated toy or a familiar appliance operates
in order to explain its physical principles to students. My activities
in FEd remind me how much some research physicists in industry and
at research laboratories contribute to teaching physics, largely as
volunteers. They tell me that these teaching activities enrich their
professional as well as their personal lives. We all remember times
when fresh approaches to difficult problems occur to us when we are
trying to explain our work to others.
So it appears that teaching physics and doing physics are still as
complementary as they have traditionally been. I hope this tradition
will continue in future years.
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