Whether you echo this sentiment, or you know someone else who does, you know that it is an exclamation of frustration, especially for those students who find themselves struggling in a class for the very first time. When you are accustomed to relying on memorization to demonstrate your grasp of an academic subject, physics can feel like a completely different universe.
Yet, the concepts you learn in physics classes are very much about the universe you already know. When introductory courses begin, they focus on measurement, units, and definitions of physical quantities that describe the behavior of the world around us. Pretty quickly, students get exposed to representing motion, and changes in motion, with graphs of position and velocity as functions of time. In these early days of a physics class, instructors ask students to wrap their minds around mathematical concepts and relationships that have a tendency to divide their student populations in half. One half is comfortable enough with math and can follow along. The other half is not as confident with math. Maybe they've gone through school saying, "I'm just not good at math," and they've likely heard this from well-intentioned family members as well. These students expect to struggle whenever physics feels like a math class, and the self-fulfilling prophecy can take a very strong hold.
Not long after the class population is broken up into these two groups, "math-shy" and "math-confident," the instructor starts solving example problems up on the board. Worse yet, the students suddenly have physics problems to solve on their own as homework.
"I hate physics."
Over time, students acquire the opinion that every unit in physics class has more and more examples of different types of problems that they have to know how to solve. Rather than focusing on acquiring and sharpening problem-solving skills, students are immediately overwhelmed by what seems like an unfair volume of things to learn.
It doesn't have to be this way. With proper guidance and emphasis on problem-solving, that feeling of having to recognize and understand countless different types of problems gets replaced with confidence in one's grasp of a problem-solving process that helps students master intro physics, tackle more advanced classes, and solve real-world problems down the road.
Physics is an extraordinary subject that taps into one's imagination, making connections between theory and what we observe in our world. It pushes the mind to keep digging for answers, for explanations that help us make sense of "magic." This is not something to hate.
The emphasis on learning proper process is what makes Varsity Physics the most impactful and most effective physics tutoring solution available, anywhere. Regardless of where a student is in their classroom curriculum, Varsity Physics can help.
Comments