After a staff development day on Monday, we started trimester 2 this week. This trimester, I’m adding two sections of Physics to my teaching load.

AP Physics 1: Impulse

This week we spent a lot of time working with impulse. Near the end of last trimester, it clicked for me that my students have been very quick to grasp conceptual thinking and can do great on problems like those from TIPERs, but need more practice than I’ve been giving them on calculations. To help with that, we did a lot of whiteboarding calculations this week and did a lot of work making sure everyone grasped the connections between momentum bar charts, force vs. time graphs, and the equations we’re working with. This was the kind of week where I really saw the value of frequently changing groups; since students were with different people almost every day, they were pushed to do a lot of explaining their thinking to each other rather than falling into the shorthand that can happen when you are working with the same people consistently.

Physics: Vector Addition Diagrams
This week, we did a lot of work translating between free body diagrams and vector addition diagrams. We did an activity I love from Casey Rutherford where students make arrows out of pipe cleaners over the FBD, then rearrange them to make the VAD. Students had done some practice with this at the end of last trimester, so things went pretty smoothly, but it was helpful for me to start getting a feel for what they have down and what they need more work on before we start adding in calculations.

One thing that felt a little tricky this week has been figuring out how to establish the classroom culture that I want. Usually, around half of our students stay in the same hour for physics when a new trimester starts, so I’ve gotten used to have to do some culture-building at the start of a trimester for the students who are new to the hour, especially if they had the other physics teacher, but I have a foundation to build on thanks to the students who’ve been in that hour since September. What’s been tricky this week is there is still a core of students who have been with each other in this space doing physics together since September, but they were with a different teacher who has some differences in the kind of culture he builds, so I’m asking students to unlearn some things that have been established as part of physics class for the majority. I’m trying to be really explicit about why I’m doing things the way I am and leaning much harder into culture-building strategies than I normally do at this point in the year, but I think we’ll get here.