Physics Education

I’m an effective Physics teacher because I struggled so much as a Physics student.

Perhaps like you, I was a good student overall. I achieved good grades and had reasonable expectations of being accepted to a good college. For me, as an 11th grade student, life was good. But then came the horror that was physics! Three months into the course I was so lost I couldn’t ask an intelligent question. I had stopped trying to hand in lab reports and had to endure the only parent conference that I have ever had – it was humiliating and embarrassing. I survived the course, and managed to make it to college.

Like many who enter college, I bounced around to a couple different majors before I settled on Mathematics and Engineering, specifically Chemical Engineering because I liked Chemistry. Irony of ironies, I was not told that Engineering was mostly…PHYSICS! Four years of Strength of Materials, and Intense Thermodynamics and many other classes that had little to do with Chemistry, but were filled with problem solving, equations, and challenging material. Much like my experience with high school Physics, I survived. Then, an interesting thing happened on my way to get a job.

I had a chance conversation with a wise older man who talked to me about becoming a Physics teacher. I laughed at first and explained that I was one of the worst Physics students on the planet! His response changed my life. In short, he told me that because it had been tough for me, I was in a position to understand what most students feel like. Wow! That change in perspective changed my life’s course and guided me to a satisfying teacher career that spanned 17 years and hundreds of students, lead me to enjoy cool, challenging work at NASA, and now has allowed me to a fulfilling job at K¹², where I work with world-class people at a job that I truly love.

So maybe you are struggling today with a course that you do not enjoy. Maybe you are trying your best at something and not succeeding. Let me encourage you to do your best, and what seems like failure to you now, may one day open the door to something that you never saw coming. Though is may sound cliché, stick with it.

Things happen for a reason, and nothing that you do to educate yourself is ever a waste. You simply never know when and how it might help someone else on down the road. I have been fortunate to touch the lives of a few (or more) people deeply because of a course that I really wish someone would have allowed me to quit. I am thankful that I didn’t! Have you ever experienced anything like this? Feel free to leave a comment here telling me about it – I always enjoy hearing such stories and find them inspirational.

Here on the thinktanK¹² blog I’ll be posting about various Math and Physics topics that catch my eye—and that will hopefully inspire you or your student to not give up when these subjects become a challenge!