As I like to tell my students, I may have a Ph.D. from Caltech; I may have taken more than a dozen college-level physics courses; I may have aced AP Physics at Uni High 30 years back; and I may have designed radiation detectors and imaging devices for cutting-edge astronomy research projects. No matter. The physics I teach in Room A302, I learned in the past two years - and I am still learning it today. In fact, much of what I taught this school year I learned only days - and sometimes hours - before my students.
How can this be? Put simply, I hardly got to lay hands on a single piece of experimental apparatus in high-school physics - we were too busy prepping for a standardized test. And in college the labs were seemingly divorced from the lectures, reading material, and problems. I can hardly remember setting foot in a college physics lab; and when I did, the lab usually involved turning a knob and measuring something I had no way to really see or feel.
I also had absolutely no idea how the folks who formed our physical theories - the Galileos, the Newtons, the Franklins, the Faradays - discovered or developed their ideas, or how simple some of their essential experiments were.
To be fair to my charismatic, enthusiastic, and approachable high-school physics teacher, and to the professors (of all types) I had at UC Berkeley, they simply didn't have the resources that are available to a physics teacher in the 21st century. Among those resources:
- a phenomenal book series by Joy Hakim, telling the tale of how our mechanistic worldview came into being;
- the "Physics Classroom" web site from a Glenbrook, Illinois, teacher - easily the equal of any high-school textbook on the market, with engaging animations and interactive questions;
- the University of Colorado's incredible "Physics Education Technology" web site (phet.colorado.edu), a research-based library of computer games that allow you to build virtual electric circuits, pilot a lunar lander, and more;
- Paul Hewitt's Conceptual Physics textbooks, with their down-to-earth language, engaging hand-drawn figures, and numerous real-world applications;
- The Mechanical Universe, an all-encompassing physics video course from PBS, now streaming for free (along with myriad other resources) at Annenberg Media's learner.org;
- Bill Nye's hilarious, slightly subversive videos, many of which (in likely violation of copyright law) are, for the time being, available on YouTube in 8-minute chunks;
- complete, in-depth online courses on subjects like electrostatics and the physics of music, courtesy the Wright Center for Science Education at Tufts University;
- or the Exploratorium web site, with its numerous videos and low-tech science projects that use everyday materials to bring concepts to life.
Nor did my teachers and professors have the opportunity, as I have had, to benefit from more than a decade's worth of research, at the University of Washington, Arizona State, and elsewhere, on science education. Such research has documented the concrete advantages of group discussions; interactive lectures; and above all inquiry-based learning, in which students discover some of nature's laws rather than being taught those laws upfront.
Yesterday my students wrapped coated copper wires around nails and attached the wires to AA batteries, creating miniature magnets capable of lifting paper clips and wrestling compass needles from the Earth's magnetic grip. They observed what happened when they reversed the flow of electric current through their coppery coils, and they went home charged with concocting theories to account for the things they saw and felt.
Several recalled doing a similar experiment in grade school. But not me. Only last weekend did I have (or seize) the opportunity to systematically explore the ways in which I could affect the strength and polarity of an electromagnet; and only last weekend, while playing around in my classroom, did I really breathe life into theories that I had parroted in successively more "advanced" physics classes - none of which offered the opportunity to actually put those theories to the test.
In the days to come, my students will play "physics video games" and watch a filmstrip or two in hopes of anchoring the patterns they may have noticed when doing their lab. It's a great time to be a physics teacher - at least, that is, if you're fortunate enough (as I am) to teach in a school with a reliable Internet connection; a computer lab or laptop cart; a modest budget for supplies; compassionate colleagues to kick ideas around with; and, most important of all, high-school juniors who are willing to humor you when asked to repeat what at first glance appears to be a third-grade science experiment.
Copyright 2009 Joshua Roth.