Brown girl

The stuff we learned was interesting but it was hard to learn at first. After I got used to the teaching style and began doing individual stuff, it was actually fun.

This is an anonymous post by a student on my WebPage:

http://physics.etl.myfxh.com/viewtopic.php?p=218#218

This is my response:
 
I like that. It was fun.

Next time around though. I plan to work more directly with students. Some ideas.

The first day of classes, give a pretest like this year; but unlike this year, I won't let the students off-the-hook, until they know all the concepts in the pretest. This year I gave the pretest again at the end of the year, and I did not see much improvement. A week for this seems reasonable, all the class and I, talking about what physics is all about.

The second week give a math pretest. This I expect will take more than one week. We need, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and vector algebra. The last topic will just be introduced, we will work all year on this mathematics topic together with trigonometry.

Now we are ready to start. I do not plan to cover a book almost cover to cover as I did this year. A more qualitative approach seems to work at the high school level; definitely more emphasis on experiments and demonstrations is better than the more abstract approach I took.

All of you did almost everything I asked from you, for that I thank you. I was expecting you to do more than I asked; some of you did, I am very impressed with you and I think you will do well in academic and practical work.

Finally next time around, I will put my students in a little more stress, as long as nobody gets hurt; I think it is actually good for students to work harder and direct them away from a lot of entertainment that is not productive.