What have I been teaching all these years?
Both the climber’s point of view mentioned earlier, and the question above, make sharing advantages of deep simplification with students something that will require development, teamwork, and focussed effort.
Simply rewriting whole text sections will never work. Even at the senior undergraduate level, Kittel and Kroemer’s attempt to recast from scratch is difficult to implement, even for those who sympathize, because notation standards (e.g. encountered on the GRE) may not follow so quickly.
Hence we propose the development of optional sections for existing textbooks, contributed oft-times by guest authors. If these sections really add value and at the same time are pedagogically sound, teachers will ask that they be offered in future editions. At that point, they can become non-optional, and other sections can draw from the connections they offer.
Three optional sections of several involving “thermo”, currently in development here, are caricatured in the slides to follow…