What Happened to Physics Class? A Science Teacher’s Perspective
I set the bowling ball on the floor and lifted it to my chin. The chain creaked. Twenty-five students watched, most of them with the polite, wary attention you get when teenagers suspect a trick is coming. I let go. The ball swung away, came back, and stopped an inch from my face. Then I asked, as I always have, “Why didn’t it hit me?”
A hand went up in the third row. “Is this going to be on the test?”
That question used to annoy me. Now it just feels inevitable. Somewhere between my first year of teaching and now, physics class stopped being about the bowling ball. It became about the formula that predicts when the bowling ball will come back, and the multiple-choice answer that asks which of four calculations is correct.
I’ve been teaching physics for fourteen years. I started in a room with windows that opened, a sink full of rubber stoppers, and a storage closet overflowing with things that looked like science treasures: old galvanometers, vacuum tubes, a wooden box of polarizing filters. My first year, I had students build mousetrap cars. We raced them down the hallway. We broke three hall passes and one window, but nobody asked if it would be on the test, because the test was still three months away and I hadn’t mentioned it once.
Last month, I tried to do the bowling ball pendulum with my afternoon section. A student in the back—tired, hood up—asked if I could just show a video instead. “It takes too long to set up,” he said. He wasn’t being rude. He was being efficient. In his world, knowledge is something that happens on a screen, inside a two-minute clip with a narrator who tells you the answer before you’ve had time to wonder.
That’s what has happened to physics class. We’ve let wonder become optional.
Physics is the study of the ordinary world, but it has turned into a discipline of abstracted signs. Students sit in rows and copy equations. They learn that acceleration equals the change in velocity over time, and they can plug numbers into that equation with impressive speed. But when I ask them to predict which of two cups will cool faster, or why a ladder feels heavier at the bottom, they look at me like I’ve switched languages. The equation is comfortable. The physical object is unpredictable. They don’t trust the object.
Part of this is the system. Our district adopted a pacing guide that says we spend exactly four days on Newton’s second law. The lab equipment from the storage closet has been replaced with online simulations, which are clean, safe, and infinitely repeatable. There is a time and place for a good simulation. But a simulation doesn’t let you feel the tension in the string. It doesn’t smell like dust and dry erase markers. It doesn’t leave a faint bruise on the bridge of your nose if you make a mistake—which is how I remember the law of inertia, not because a textbook told me, but because I flinched and the ball still didn’t hit me.
I’m not blaming any individual student or parent. The pressure to cover content is real. Tests come every few weeks. Parents ask, reasonably, “What are you doing in physics today?” The answer “we spent the period rolling balls off the table” sounds like a waste of time, even though rolling balls off a table is the only way to understand projectile motion. We’ve created a physics class that produces students who can solve equations but cannot explain why a coin and a feather fall differently in a vacuum. That’s not physics. That’s just algebra wearing a lab coat.
There are small things I’ve started doing, and they’re working, at least enough to see a flicker.
First, I now answer the “is this on the test” question differently. Instead of saying “no,” I say, “It’s not on the test, but the thing that’s on the test is about why the ball didn’t hit me. If you can explain why, you’ll do fine. If you can’t, you’ll memorize the formula and forget it by Friday.” Then I make them stay until they can say, in their own words, why the ball returns. It takes an extra three minutes. The first few times, they squirm. But after a month, a few of them started asking, “Can we see the bowling ball again?” That’s a win.
Second, I’ve made a rule that before any calculation problem, students have to predict what will actually happen in the real world. Not “what number will you get,” but “what will this object do?” If a problem says a car accelerates from rest to 60 mph in six seconds, I ask, “Will a typical car actually do that, or is this a race car?” Then I make them guess. It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to be a guess about reality. This has shifted the conversation from “what equation do I need” to “what is happening here.” It’s a small adjustment—one less worked example at the end of the period—but it gives the students a reason to care.
For parents, I understand you don’t have a physics lab at home. But you have a kitchen. That’s enough. When your child brings home a physics worksheet, before they open the textbook, ask them to find something in the house that matches the problem. Sofa sliding across the rug? A bike braking at a stop sign? A phone falling out of a pocket? Then ask them to estimate, out loud, how fast or how far. The numbers don’t matter. The act of connecting the equation to a real object matters more than any calculation.
Another habit that helps: ask “what happened that didn’t work?” instead of “what did you learn today?” The first time I asked my own daughter this, she said, “The pulley snapped and the bucket fell.” That was a better physics lesson than any worksheet she’d brought home. She had to explain why the bucket accelerated downward, why the tension varied, and why her prediction was wrong. That’s physics. It just didn’t look like a neat boxed problem.
I know we can’t go back to the old physics class. The windows are sealed now, the storage closet has two defibrillators and a box of expired latex gloves, and the district recently bought a set of tablets that take priority over the bottle of dry sand in the back cabinet. But I don’t think we need to. We just need to make room for the object again—even if it’s only for three minutes before the bell rings.
This afternoon, my last class was studying energy conservation. I had planned to do a short demonstration, then move to practice problems. But when I set up the ramp, a girl in the front row asked, “Does the height of the ramp matter if the ball is heavy?” We stopped. We rolled a steel ball down the ramp at three different heights. We measured the distance it knocked a foam cup. The class missed the last five minutes of practice problems. They’ll struggle a little on the homework tonight. But tomorrow, when I ask them what energy they need to get the ball up a ramp, they’ll know it because they saw it.
The cursor blinking on my slides says I still have practice problems for Thursday. I’ll get through them. But before that, I’m going to bring in a pendulum made of string and a coffee mug. It’s not going to be on the test. I’ll ask if anyone can tell me why the mug doesn’t smash. Then we’ll talk about what happens when you let go.
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