Ideas on How to Teach Weight

from Bob Ward; I tell my kids I am going to open an weight loss clinic and charge customers $1 a pound for instant weight loss. I am going to weight them while I pull upward on them. When I make enough money, I am going to put a scale on a steep ramp and weigh them. After I make even more money, I am going to install an elevator and weigh them as the elevator accelerates down. A favorite classroom demo is taping a 100 g mass to an electronic scale and tilting it. Gee, folks, things seem to weigh less on hills. Does that make sense? No. I also ask them what a scale would read if they strapped it to their feet and jumped off a tall building. Their reply is 'zero.' Good. So, if they are weightless, then they should float just like a 'weightless' astronaut does. Right? Wrong. from Christopher Becke A very bright former colleague of mine would show his students how to weigh the earth. Hed first stand on a bathroom scale and weigh himself, then flip the scale over, weighing the earth. from Paul Lulai I do think (hope) we can all agree that the term apparent weight = scale reading = normal force. In fact I do believe that this has shown up on ap tests in the past. from Hugh Haskell Weight is something that students *feel* (so do we all, but we're talking about students now). When we sit in a chair its the force we feel the chair putting on our rear ends. It is a tangible thing and very real to students, and clearly a variable, as they experience every time they go to an amusement park. While gravity works on us, we don't "feel" it. When gravity is the only significant force acting on us, we feel weightless. Apparently we don't feel the force of gravity directly, Whether this is some psychological phenomenon, or perhaps a result of the fact that it is very nearly uniform over our whole body, I don't know. I suggest checking out Anthony Zee's book of several years ago called "An Old Man's Toy," for some deeper speculation on this phenomenon. from Dan Burns My students call this normalforcelessness. I urge you and physics teachers everywhere to start instituting the use of this word so that someday, maybe soon, it won't have a red line under it when I type it!

This movement is starting to gather momentum, see: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=normalforcelessness from Marc Reif Arnold Arons (one of the founders of the Physics Education Research movement) has a nice section on the topic of operational definitions in his book Teaching Introductory Physics. Amazon has it for about 3000 Thai Baht. That would be pages 81-88. Seven pages to discuss what many believe is an easy subject! Aaron starts with a quote from Galilio's Dialog that calling something gravity says nothing about it. That students expect an air filled balloon to float in the vacuum jar and the term gravity is used for g and Fg indiscriminately by students. Arons does say that weight is the force of gravity, and it is dangerous to define it as the scale reading as support force is really what we feel and it muddies the third law. As we all do, Arons laments the term weightlessness and argues that using scale reading reinforces the notion of no gravity in space. to combat this he argues that many demonstrations need to be used from free fall to elevators. He also warns that most student parrot the fact that all objects fall at the same rate but attribute it to they have the same force of gravity. Arons ends by quoting an 1981 study by Gunstone and White of an atwoods machine with various positions but equal masses. over a quarter of them predicted a larger force on the one closer to the earth and if you added mass to the higher one it would move down until it was lower then stop because it was lower.. Arons finishes with a warning that could be applied to every topic in physics, just because we view gravity as trivial do not assume the students understand it. Students must be given and discuss many examples like the ones above to know what their weight is.