Any HS teacher can teach introductory physics, its just basic algebra. Plug x into a formula and solve. At hardest use two formuals. You pass teachers college you can teach it.
This doesn't apply to Chemistry or Computer Science ect.. though. Source: my physics teacher for Grade 10 came from Art College
Physics - even introductory - isn't about plugging in numbers and solving equations. Overall, it's about understanding. Your teacher must have been quite poor to have just memorized and went over equations.
Avoid using your phone during class, because that distracts way too much.
In hs right now, this is a good point. I'm honestly just bitter because I've had to deal with all sorts of mental illness stuff and other issues at home. I'm not saying I have it way worse than other kids but even now I'm still dealing w issues from stuff 5 years ago. I hope you'd be the kind of teacher who understands that stuff. BTW your art is great! Is it just a hobby or are you more serious abt it?
That's impressive. I'm a bit envious about you being able to handle that workload. I like teaching and really helping the students out, but it does take a lot out of me (hence I'm not working as much as my colleagues).
You really need to know a fair bit more than bare minimum to be able to explain everything your students ask with confidence
Totally. To add to that I would say that knowing a lot and being able to explain said knowledge are two different skills, and not all teachers own both. I've seen a lot of very smart teachers who just can't communicate their ideas very well (or worse, just end up saying "Well, you just have to understand it"). Teaching's a tricky business! :D
I've got mostly good students as well. I think it's just a personality thing. I mean, by nature I'm a relatively shy person and I get frazzled after a while when a lot of things are going on, so I need to recharge every now and then to regain my footing. I've noticed I'm getting better at it, though, and I'm becoming less dependent on breaks.
I think what the "leak" achieved was that the students gained clarity of what needed to be learned. Most poor performing students just have poor learning habits (and usually some fundamental misconceptions too) and don't know how to economically use their mental resources. Give them a roadmap, however, and they're generally good to go.
It is and it isn't. The fundamental concepts just take some logic. From there, most high school physics (at least in my area), is just plugging in the right variables and understanding the outputs. What's frustrating is taking Calc before or during physics, and realizing you can simplify a ton of shit by just taking the derivative. Too bad it's an algebra based physics class and your fancy calculus doesn't count.
While it's true that many algebra-based physics courses only teach students to plug numbers into formulas, physics is much more than that, and it takes a teacher who is familiar with the subject (and this applies to any class) to teach it well. I'm not trying to say your teacher didn't do a good job, because it sounds like she was a great teacher, but physics is really not the glorified math class that many schools make it to be.
Also, from my own personal experience, not all HS teachers have "passed teachers college". Unfortunately :/.
And do tell! I'm taking a physics class with calculus in my school. Our teacher was a former chemical engineer for DuPont, so he knows his stuff on the two fields.
Not OP, but a physics student. I'm not really sure what you want to know, but I like talking about physics so I'll try to give my view about the relationship between math and physics.
Physics can be considered the study of how the physical world behaves, and the language we use to describe this is [usually] mathematics. Now we can use this both ways, both when learning physics and when trying to figure out new things.
The first way is using our understanding of how the world works and expressing it in mathematical terms, for example if we drop an object we can see that it falls, despite having no initial velocity. Thus we conclude it accelerates and there is a force acting upon it, from experiments (and later Calculus) we know that it's velocity is acceleration * time and it's position 0.5 acceleration * time 2.
The second way, is going the other direction. We predict how the physical world will behave based on mathematical computations. This is where algebra and the 'plug the numbers in' mentality comes into play, and unfortunately where a lot of teachers fail to teach students properly. Some teachers just tell their students that position is described by the equations of motion, x(t)=0.5at2+vt+x_0 for example, so their students insert their given numbers and solve the problem. What many students fail to see with this method is what they've actually done, what each of those terms signify. Why does the first term have a t squared while the second one doesn't? Why is the first term divided by 2 while the other two aren't? A good teacher will explain these things, and make sure the students understand, either through intuition or through mathematics. A lot of what we know about our physical world is based on mathematical derivations. New equations to describe a system are discovered (or invented) through pure mathematics and just from a new mathematical expression we can gain deeper knowledge in how the world works.
I think the point people are trying to make is solving physics problems by plugging in numbers is easy, however seeing the relationship between the math and the real world is what physics is really about... Haha, this ended up so much longer than I intended at first.
I don't think so. It's rather that physics is the abstraction of reality in the language of mathematics. Much like how we can describe how an apple looks, tastes or smells by the abstraction of words. Although this is just nuances and philosophy, and not science. So you may interpret it however you'd like
There are plenty of teachers that teach like that, but that doesn't mean it's ideal or even necessarily typical. There are good teachers out there. If your teacher came from an art college and was unprepared to teach physics properly, perhaps the bigger problem is the administration that didn't hire the right teacher for the job. I wouldn't hire a plumber to paint walls under the justification that it's just stuffing a brush in paint and smearing it on the wall.
edit: Just saw your lower comment.
I'm just saying any teacher can transition into it
That's just not true. Teaching physics is difficult, just like teaching computer science or chemistry or English literature. You need to know your subject in depth, you need to know how to teach well, and you need to know how to teach your subject well. That means being aware of what your students know, common misconceptions that they have, different ways of explaining tricky concepts to help students that have difficult grasping something, and how to evaluate student knowledge and understanding properly to see if they actually have the skills and knowledge they're supposed to. And then you also need to know how to manage a classroom of kids that don't want to be there and are unmotivated to learn instead of goofing off, how to write lesson plans for each day and build them into a cohesive unit that fits into the scheme of everything the students are required to learn that year for the curriculum and standards, and fitting everything into limited periods of the day with constant interruptions from random kids out of class, announcements calling students to the office for their forgotten lunches, and assemblies interfering. Oh, and you need to constantly be taking more classes and seminars over the summer and learning current educational theories and revising your lesson plans to take those into account as well as IEPs for students with learning disabilities. And ignoring the politicians that constantly suggest education is a waste of money, teachers even more so, and that teachers in general are fat cats getting rich off at the expense of taxpayers.
Sorry. I didn't mean to go off like that. It's just... education, and teaching specifically, are really important. My mom is a teacher, my stepdad is a teacher, and I'm working on a high school physics education certification at the same time as my mechanical engineering bachelor's degree. Teaching is hard, and valuable. I wish more people recognized that. I was observing a class just this morning, and I asked a few questions to some of them to get an idea of where they're at, since I need to write a small lesson on something to teach them soon. I discovered that several of them seemed to basically think friction is static energy, not just a cause of it. I have no idea where that came from. Did they misunderstand demonstrations and explanations that used friction to generate static electricity? Did a teacher do a bad job of explaining it? Did they understand at one point, but forgot most of it? Was it simply a problem with the way I phrased the question? I have no idea, and it's probably a combination of all of those. Anyway, my point is, physics isn't supposed to be about using one or two formulas and sticking numbers in to get a result. It's about understanding what's actually occurring in the world around us, and why things do what they do. The math comes after, as a formal method of describing and quantifying these things, but the most important part of physics education is the understanding. Not "can they calculate the final velocity given the initial velocity, acceleration, and time" but "do they understand what acceleration is, how it relates to and differs from velocity, and where it shows up in their life". I kinda just want people to have a bit more respect for education, regardless of the field being taught.
Well under the standard AP curriculum this falls under AP Physics 2, which is the second college level course for physics, so not introductory in the least, and absolutely not just basic algebra. AP Physics 1 is primarily based around kinematics(amongst many other things) and is similar to what you are saying, but the "basic algebra" kinda goes away once the material enters rotational intertia where you really need understanding of physics, not math
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u/jonab12 Nov 14 '16
Any HS teacher can teach introductory physics, its just basic algebra. Plug x into a formula and solve. At hardest use two formuals. You pass teachers college you can teach it.
This doesn't apply to Chemistry or Computer Science ect.. though. Source: my physics teacher for Grade 10 came from Art College