James Ball, University of Guelph Sessional Lecturer
jball10@uoguelph.ca



In the winter of 1977 at the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) conference in Chicago, Ernie McFarland (then a faculty member at the University of Guelph) had a chance meeting with Scarborough high school teacher George Kelly. Both felt that it shouldn’t be necessary for Ontario’s physics teachers to travel to the United States to become better teachers. As a result of Ernie and George’s efforts, the OAPT (then known as AAPT-Ontario) became an official section of the AAPT in 1979 with Ernie as it’s first president. If you are interested in the history of the OAPT you can find an article, not surprisingly written by Ernie, here.

I first remember meeting Ernie during my second-year mechanics course at the University of Guelph. I had switched majors from marine biology to physics after my first year. Ernie helped make the transition smooth. Ernie’s style of teaching made his students feel comfortable and welcome. He’d often share stories or jokes that seemed spontaneous, but they had been thought out well in advance to help convey an idea or concept that might be otherwise challenging.

His demos were legendary. They were never demonstrations for the sake of entertainment (though they always entertained). Ernie was doing what we now call POE (predict observe explain) or PEOE (predict explain observe explain) long before it had an acronym. Ernie was a physics teacher who realized that how physics was taught was more important that what was being taught (though he made sure you understand the what as well).

Tags: History, Pedagogy