In the movie Peggy-Sue Got Married, Peggy-Sue went back in time to her high-school days.  One of the memorable scenes is when she met her high-school math teacher.  She stated that she knew, for a fact, that she would never need to use math again in her life, so his class was not important.  I had a similar instance this week when a student made the same basic statement.  She wrote a short essay on the exam that she had lost her job and “didn’t really care to know all this stuff.”  She then realized that the class she was in was required for her degree, so she promised to try harder.  The essay was well written, grammatically correct, and written in very nice handwriting.  She failed the essay question, given that the question was not an essay.  She was supposed to calculate the distance of an object from a lens given its inverted image distance from the lens.  She may have also discovered that it might be a little late to start caring about the class, given the class was in its ninth week of 15 weeks.

It has been a while since I have had a student, in a college course, not care at all about the class.  The last event like this was when I was teaching calculus-based physics to students who were in liberal arts programs, but had to take the physics course to graduate.  It is a challenge to constantly come up with exercises and problems that relate to the rest of the world, and not specifically to the course of instruction.   Physics would be important to most of the students, given that many would graduate and serve the Army as artillery and armor officers, where projectile motion was definitely part of the job.  They eventually probably figured out that Brian’s examples of projectile motion were relevant.  Go Army, Beat Navy!