Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

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Unfortunately, the words physical educa- tion lack clarity in denoting the nature of a field of inquiry or discipline. Because of the physical educator’s concern with human movement, his field is frequently understood to be activity itself rather than a domain of knowledge. Actually, activity is a means to an end. and physi- cal fitness, frequently thought to be that end. is a desirable by-product. The physical educator sees human move- ment in terms of its relation to the wholeness of man. Man is a biological organism. Man must act. His movement is expressive or functional. It is governed by physical laws and is described in terms of force, time, and space. Physical education is. in a sense, an applied field, concerned with the complex interplay of sensory, perceptual, and psychological variables which must be simultaneously involved in both gross motor learning and highly skilled performance. At Mount Holyoke College one is chal- lenged to provide experiences which will realize the full potential of the remarka- ble human body to the end that it might approach its best in health, in skill, and in joy, and function as a bulwark for its creative and intellectual endeavors. Jessie Lie

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 Present-day mathematics is properly characterized as a living, growing element of culture embodying con- cepts about abstract structures and relations between these structures . . . Like any other cultural element, mathematics grows by evolution and diffusion.” (Wilder, Introduction to Foundations of Mathematics, Wiley and Sons, I‘ 52) In the setting of a liberal arts college such as Mount Holyoke, then, the study of mathematics for itself, as well as in the modern trend to enlarge the role of mathematics in diverse fields, should find a favorable climate. In recent years increased interest in independ- ent study in this field has been marked and the new four-course curriculum has provided greater opportu- nity for students to broaden their horizons both within and outside formal course offerings. Grace E. Bates People operating within an academic sphere usually have many more interests than they can possibly pinsuc. A scientist who has chosen to teach, must allot his or her time among three main areas: teach- ing. keeping up with advances in the subject, and research. I am convinced that one cannot teach a scientific subject at the college level without being personally involved in research. To me. teaching science is not just a matter of presenting facts and theories. I hope to show the intellectual excitement of research, to show the fumbles, frustrations and hard work which precedes the happy moments when the experimental observations fall into place. Both teaching and research require awareness of developments in one's subject. There is never enough time to do all three well but in the college atmosphere they can be combined, each giving mean- ing to the others. Jytte Mutts

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The future progress of civilization, indeed its mere survival, may depend upon the capacity of nten and women of disparate disciplines somehow to resolve the dilemma created by the need to specialize and. simultaneously, the need to per- ceive and to communicate the relevancy of specialized knowledge to the more general problems of man. The professor (ami student) of literature, for example, is aware that only the most skillful analysis of a poem will enhance rather than destroy its whole. The biolo- gist often consciously destroys the whole in order to analyze its parts, and. though Ik might be successful in gaining a degree of understanding of the parts by this approach, he sometimes loses sight of the fact that untierstanding of the isolated parts does not automatically by summation gain the whole. The problems of learning and of teaching in any area arc not unique to that area. An awareness of this may serve as one kind of reminder of the need to seek unity rather than to deplore diversity. Kathryn M. Eschenberg Of the research in physics that is done in connection with educational work, the vast majority is carried on at large uni- versities, where a professor teaches one or (at most) two courses and devotes the rest of his time to research, where in most eases his real interest lies. It is difficult for a physics professor to maintain his “respectability among re- search physicists and still be really con- cerned about teaching. In liberal arts col- leges (including Mount Holyoke) each teacher is assumed to do a full-time job of teaching. Any research is done on top of this load. It is obvious, then, that the atmosphere and operation of a small college present serious drawbacks to a person with re- search ambitions. On the other hand, the liberal arts col- lege is a good place for exercising one's interest in the relationship between phys- ics and other disciplines, for relating physics to all other possible aspects of life, and for enquiry into the history and meaning of the ideas of physics. It is this more general aspect of the work of the college teacher of science that leads many good physicists to choose the role of the teacher and relegate to a second- ary position any ambitions for research. Homer C. Wilkins