If you’re a teacher — of physics, or any other physical science — and haven’t yet picked up a copy of Edward Redish’s Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite , I’m making a bid right now that you do so.
I finally read it — really read it — instead of just browsing through a chapter […]

 
Below I am reposting a rather long piece taken verbatim from the website of Steve Detweiler who just says that it’s an “amusing anecdote from a friend of mine.” So, I’m not sure of the veracity of the story, and some claim that it’s an urban legend. It may well be. But […]

Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.
As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved. David Sokoloff showed how they have […]

This session is about how using discrepant (or “surprising”) events to teach physics

There’s quite a bit of evidence showing that students don’t really get what we want them to get from demonstrations, but they do like them. They get a lot more out of them if we ask them to predict the results of […]

This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.
Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — […]

This session is about how we prepare our undergraduates for graduate school — what to consider, and how we’re doing.
One thing to consider, in thinking about the goals of our undergraduate majors, is that we actually don’t want to prepare all of our undergraduates for graduate school. Physics is a liberal arts degree, […]

Our education research group here at University of Colorado had a visit and a very interesting talk by Sanjoy Mahajan, director of the teaching and learning laboratory at MIT and former physics professor, last semester. He focuses on understanding and improving students number sense, mostly through use of approximations and estimations. He’s a […]

Here was an interesting discussion on a science teacher’s listserv, which came down to the question — can a vacuum become a conductor? What is it that we really need in order for charge to flow between two points? What is the physics of electron flow? The physics teacher in question wrote:
The […]

I’ve had a set of “bad science movies” on my Netflix queue for a while, and every once in a while I dip into it. Each time it feels a bit risky, like trying some weird new combination, like cherry dip on my mint chocolate chip ice cream cone. Sometimes it’s OK. […]

In this modern world, it gets tougher and tougher to figure out if someone is a Jim or a Jane. Whatever happened to the easy era of codpieces and corsets? Without those to fall back on, here’s a bit of physics you can use to figure it out in a pinch.
Have the person […]