Just give us the equations.

I finished my student teaching practice at Glenbard East High School in Lombard. In my physics web page you can read the comments by my students after a whole year of study. A recurrent complain I had during the year, that shows up again in the WebPage, is the difficulty in deriving physics formulas. Students prefer to be given a list of formulas with indications as to when to use them, instead of deriving them in class.

This was an error in my lessons. I forgot how was it when I was the age of the students. In the beginning one does not see the point in coming from first principles and deriving general results. Tasks have to be specific. It is only after months of familiarity with the subject matter that patterns appear in our mind. They are right and I am wrong. Next time around I will be more concrete, more demonstrations and experiments, and as the course develops then it will get more abstract. I myself do not have a very abstract mind, the previous note on Plebanski's action is an introduction to a subject that requires more mathematical knowledge than what I have right now. We are all in this continuum of understanding, some of us are more concrete than others, but all of us should move up in the "abstraction ladder"