One Way to Stay Fresh
Greetings!
After a decade teaching physics, I've gone back to grad school to spend a few years trying to learn about, and help improve, physics teaching. One thing I'd always wanted as a teacher was a weekly
summary of all the stuff I ought to know as a physics educator. Now that I have a bit more discretionary time and some exciting new connections, I'm going to try to write exactly that bulletin, in hope that it is useful for the community of great physics teachers. My broad inspiration is Raymond Johnson's (stalled?) MathEd.net project. I hope that this will be a weekly release, coming out sometime around the weekend, and useful to those who teach physics at the high school or college level. All links are open-access and human readable, unless indicated otherwise. Good or bad, I'd appreciate your feedback!
This month's The Physics Teacher was the first in a series of issues focusing on social justice in physics education. One highlight was an article by Daane, Decker and Sawtelle about including discussions of racial equity in college physics classes. It forms a nice parallel to an earlier article by Moses Rifkin on racial equity discussions in the high school physics classroom.
The importance of social justice is clear from the graph below, prepared by AIP, that appeared on page 379. Native Americans are just one of many underrepresented groups in our discipline (and represent about 2% of the US population).
There were also good articles about programs at Chicago State (Chi Sci Scholars) and Colorado Boulder (C-Prime) that have made strides in increasing and maintaining student diversity in physics at the college level.
A report from Puerto Rico emphasized the importance of the local context when designing instructional materials, echoing a study of physics textbooks in Lebanon [paywall] that found they featured primarily white males of European descent.
We had a very useful paper about the challenges faced by women of color, and how faculty can help. It recalls a similar effort from 1983 by female computer science students at MIT: a reminder that the
culture change is long overdue.
The big physics news this week was the discovery of "aliens" in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. What was actually detected [technical] was a repeated Fast Radio Burst [FRB] signal, a
millisecond-long blast of radio waves from a distant galaxy. This was the first FRB ever detected to repeat itself. The mystery comes because (a) there is no consensus about the origin of these FRBs
(maybe magnetic earthquakes on stars, or black hole mergers?), and (b) the observation was made using the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100M effort to search for SETI that is backed by Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
As I write this, there is also news that North Korea may have tested an advanced nuclear weapon underground. There are physics angles here (how different kinds of nuclear bombs operate, how the energy released can be measured with seismographs) but I suspect most students following this story will be more worried about what it means geopolitically -- especially if they have family or friends in Korea, Japan, or Guam.
School teachers looking for resources at the start of the year could check out the AAPT K12 Teacher Portal. I find The Physics Front to be particularly valuable. It has a large catalog of learning activities
organized by topic for different types of physics classes (image below).
I've been pretty impressed with Pivot Interactives, a non-free offshoot of the Direct Measurement Videos project. At the heart of each of the dozens of experiments is a set of high-quality videos with a
variety of parameters. Students can use on-screen tools to make measurements of the variables they choose, and the whole thing is embedded in a web page with a built-in data table, graphing tool, etc.
It seems like the next step past PhET in taking a lab completely online.
I'll finish this email with an eclipse image, taken by Simon Tang. Someone on twitter (sorry, I couldn't find the tweet) suggested that students could measure the velocity of the umbral shadow across the earth. I think it would be a fun activity, with a challenging extension: explain why the speed is different on the US east and west coasts. These tools may be useful. Equally, this image prompts some questions...
Happy physicsing!
- Danny
After a decade teaching physics, I've gone back to grad school to spend a few years trying to learn about, and help improve, physics teaching. One thing I'd always wanted as a teacher was a weekly
summary of all the stuff I ought to know as a physics educator. Now that I have a bit more discretionary time and some exciting new connections, I'm going to try to write exactly that bulletin, in hope that it is useful for the community of great physics teachers. My broad inspiration is Raymond Johnson's (stalled?) MathEd.net project. I hope that this will be a weekly release, coming out sometime around the weekend, and useful to those who teach physics at the high school or college level. All links are open-access and human readable, unless indicated otherwise. Good or bad, I'd appreciate your feedback!
This month's The Physics Teacher was the first in a series of issues focusing on social justice in physics education. One highlight was an article by Daane, Decker and Sawtelle about including discussions of racial equity in college physics classes. It forms a nice parallel to an earlier article by Moses Rifkin on racial equity discussions in the high school physics classroom.
The importance of social justice is clear from the graph below, prepared by AIP, that appeared on page 379. Native Americans are just one of many underrepresented groups in our discipline (and represent about 2% of the US population).
There were also good articles about programs at Chicago State (Chi Sci Scholars) and Colorado Boulder (C-Prime) that have made strides in increasing and maintaining student diversity in physics at the college level.
A report from Puerto Rico emphasized the importance of the local context when designing instructional materials, echoing a study of physics textbooks in Lebanon [paywall] that found they featured primarily white males of European descent.
We had a very useful paper about the challenges faced by women of color, and how faculty can help. It recalls a similar effort from 1983 by female computer science students at MIT: a reminder that the
culture change is long overdue.
The big physics news this week was the discovery of "aliens" in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. What was actually detected [technical] was a repeated Fast Radio Burst [FRB] signal, a
millisecond-long blast of radio waves from a distant galaxy. This was the first FRB ever detected to repeat itself. The mystery comes because (a) there is no consensus about the origin of these FRBs
(maybe magnetic earthquakes on stars, or black hole mergers?), and (b) the observation was made using the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100M effort to search for SETI that is backed by Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
As I write this, there is also news that North Korea may have tested an advanced nuclear weapon underground. There are physics angles here (how different kinds of nuclear bombs operate, how the energy released can be measured with seismographs) but I suspect most students following this story will be more worried about what it means geopolitically -- especially if they have family or friends in Korea, Japan, or Guam.
School teachers looking for resources at the start of the year could check out the AAPT K12 Teacher Portal. I find The Physics Front to be particularly valuable. It has a large catalog of learning activities
organized by topic for different types of physics classes (image below).
I've been pretty impressed with Pivot Interactives, a non-free offshoot of the Direct Measurement Videos project. At the heart of each of the dozens of experiments is a set of high-quality videos with a
variety of parameters. Students can use on-screen tools to make measurements of the variables they choose, and the whole thing is embedded in a web page with a built-in data table, graphing tool, etc.
It seems like the next step past PhET in taking a lab completely online.
I'll finish this email with an eclipse image, taken by Simon Tang. Someone on twitter (sorry, I couldn't find the tweet) suggested that students could measure the velocity of the umbral shadow across the earth. I think it would be a fun activity, with a challenging extension: explain why the speed is different on the US east and west coasts. These tools may be useful. Equally, this image prompts some questions...
Happy physicsing!
- Danny