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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Sat, 14 Feb 2004]
Teaching Physics to High-Schoolers
About a week ago, as I was walking along the infinite corridor I saw a
poster for MIT Educational Studies Program's HSSP flyer. Essentially,
people sign up to teach classes (a 2hr class every Sat over 10 weeks) to
high-schoolers. Classes range from "Self-Hypnosis" to "Algebra-I". On a
whim, I applied. I've always wanted to try teaching freshman physics to unsuspecting kids- it can be quite similar to whacking them with a cricket bat, I am told. Moreover, I had missed the deadline so there was a low risk of the HSSP people actually calling me up. Unfortunately, I wasn't too late- they emailed back asking me to show up today with some sort of a
syllabus. I had a short interview today, got some feedback on my proposed
syllabus and was asked to attend a teacher training class which also took
place today. So anyway, I
am now set to inflict myself on unsuspecting high-schoolers and insist
that they learn about Newtonian Mechanics. How many of them will want to
do that is a different thing altogether.
So the current plan is to orient the class around problem solving sessions, e.g, "is it better to push a box or pull it?" or "why do ice-skaters pull in their arms while spinning?" etc. Hopefully, I can sneak in some of the underlying principles when solving these problems. Its going to be hard to keep math usage to a minimum, though. Even though I am aiming at juniors/seniors, I have been asked to avoid differential calculus-- very few high-schoolers are expected to know it. Still, I plan to cover to vectors, S.I. units, 1D/2D motion, Newton's Laws, force-body diagrams, conservation of linear momentum, and hopefully some rotational dynamics (billiards shots!). Lets see what I get to. Any interesting physics problems I can steal from you ?