I’m really excited to announce the AAPT High School Physics Teacher Camp 2016. The camp will be held on Sunday, July 17th (that’s the Sunday of the AAPT summer meeting) from 8 am – 5 pm at Rio Americano High School in Sacramento, CA. What is Physics Teacher Camp? The camp is a day-long interactive… Read More Physics Teacher Camp 2016
I don’t do lab reports. Maybe that’s a strange way to begin, here, but stick with me. I haven’t found lab reports to be useful assessment tools in the past. Instead, I have claimed that our work in the lab is too important to grade. It’s the basis of all of our knowledge. On the one… Read More Assessing Scientific Abilities
AKA Inventing a New Flavor of Energy Storage When we start the energy unit, we usually pick up 4 flavors (kinetic, gravitational, spring, and thermal) and note that we will recognize and name other ways of storing energy when we see them. That happens pretty immediately when we do pie charts. We run into a problem pretty… Read More Tic Tac Bounce
This fall, I will be starting my 2nd year at a really cool progressive day school in NYC. The science curriculum is in the process of evolving, but the current program has 9th and 10th graders rotating twice through physics, chemistry, and biology (in any order) on a trimester system. This past year, I taught… Read More Circuits and Charges: A Physics Active Exam
I am leading two workshops this summer. Both workshops are on teaching graphical solutions in physics. Why are graphical solutions so great in physics classes? Graphical solutions put sense-making at the center of problem solving. They work for all levels of students. They make more challenging problems accessible to students with less math confidence/experience and they… Read More July 2015 Workshops and Graphical Solutions for Physics
I’m so excited that I get to share this news. I’ve been working with a few of the people I met at AAPT in MN on a new, experimental addition to the summer meeting. We’ve been talking about how to make AAPT national meetings more useful, attractive, and worthwhile for high school physics teachers. Workshops are… Read More AAPT High School Physics Teacher Camp
I gave a workshop with Mike Pustie in NYC in June and with Casey Rutherford in Minneapolis in July on using a graphical approach to solve kinematics and force problems. I wrote a bit about the content involved in my preview post, and I wanted to follow that up here by making the slides and… Read More Graphical Solutions for Forces and Kinematics (Workshop Recap)
NOTE: This post was from 2014. This workshop already happened. Keep reading if you want to know a bit more about graphical solutions in physics. Graphical Solutions for Forces and Kinematics On the Sunday of the AAPT summer meeting (July 27th), Casey Rutherford and I are offering a free, unofficial1 workshop on using velocity graphs and… Read More Free, Unofficial Workshop during AAPT in July
So you’re thinking in terms of physical models now instead of in terms of chapters, units, or equations. Now what? Is there a high-level ordering of these ideas? How are they connected? Are there common themes? One activity that I’ve done to help students build higher-level organization into their thinking is concept maps (which I… Read More Mechanics: 3 Fundamental Principles
During our PLC chat this week, we talked at one point about how long it takes for students to become completely consistent in drawing motion graphs. My experience has been that students become confident relatively quickly in drawing the velocity-vs-time graphs (having switched their brain into thinking through v-t graphs), but still sometimes struggle to draw… Read More Drawing accelerated position-time graphs
Physics! Blog! 