What Has Happened to Physics Class? One Parent’s Honest Look at How the Subject Changed
My daughter was sitting at the kitchen table with her physics homework spread out across three sheets of paper. The problem involved a ball rolling off a table, and she had drawn a tiny parabola, then written a formula underneath it. I asked her, “So why does it move in that curve?” She looked at me for a second, then said, “Because the equation says so.” I waited. She went back to her calculator. That was the whole explanation.
I tried again. “I mean, what makes it curve instead of just falling straight down?” She sighed, the way teenage girls sigh when they think their parents are being deliberately difficult. “We’re not supposed to understand it,” she said. “We just need to know which formula to use. That’s what the test is.”
I was a little stunned. Physics was never my best subject, but I remembered it being mostly about messing around. My tenth-grade teacher had us build rubber band cars and measure their distances in the parking lot. We threw tennis balls off the roof and calculated their speed. We argued about what would happen if you dropped a feather and a hammer at the same time. We didn’t get all the math right, but we had opinions. We had guesses. Nobody ever told me to just plug in numbers and move on.
So I did what parents do. I made an appointment with her physics teacher.
The teacher was a young woman, maybe thirty, clearly tired. She had stacks of quizzes on her desk and a computer screen full of some online grading platform. I told her about the kitchen table moment, trying to keep my voice neutral. She nodded slowly, like she’d heard this before.
“I know,” she said. “It’s hard. Physics should be a conversation, but right now the curriculum expects us to get through the entire first semester of kinematics before winter break. The districts are looking at test scores. The parents are looking at grades. And the kids are looking at their phones. If I spent time on, you know, the wonder of it all, I’d fall behind.”
I asked her if she did any labs at all. She gestured toward a shelf with some old motion detectors and a bucket of foam balls. “Once in a while,” she said. “If I have an extra period. But even when we do, it’s pretty guided. The students follow the steps, get the data, and then we move on. If something weird happens, we don’t have time to investigate.”
That conversation stayed with me. I started paying attention to how physics was being taught in my daughter’s school, and also in our house. I noticed that her textbook chapters had bolded vocabulary words and sample problems. There were no questions like “What do you predict will happen?” There were questions like “A car accelerates from 0 to 20 m/s in 5 seconds. Calculate its acceleration.” The answer was a number. The reason the car was driving at all was irrelevant.
The real shift, I think, is that physics class has become a math class. It’s not about the natural world anymore. It’s about solving for x. When I was in school, physics was the subject where you could ask stupid questions and nobody laughed. Why is the sky blue? What happens if you spin a bucket of water over your head? Now those questions feel like detours. The teacher doesn’t have time for them. The curriculum doesn’t have a unit for them. And the tests certainly don’t ask them.
But I also realized I couldn’t just blame the teacher or the school system. I had to figure out what I could do at home. Because if physics has become a bunch of formulas, then the home is one of the last places where real physics can happen naturally. And it doesn’t take a lab.
My daughter and I now have a small ritual on the way to school. I’ll ask her something like, “Why do cars slow down on a curve?” or “What would happen if you threw a ball while running?” She usually rolls her eyes at first, but eventually she gives me a guess. Sometimes she’s right. Sometimes she’s wrong. That’s fine. The point is that she’s making sense of something before she sees a formula.
We also started doing this thing where she estimates before she calculates. A lot of her homework comes with a formula margin. I tell her, “Before you plug anything in, just tell me what the answer should feel like. If you drop a ball off the counter, will it take half a second or five seconds?” It’s a small change. It adds maybe thirty seconds to each assignment. But it forces her brain to connect the math to the actual universe.
I mentioned this to her teacher a few weeks later, and she said something useful. She told me to ask my daughter to explain her homework to me out loud, as if I were the one learning it. Not because I needed the lesson, but because the act of explaining a physics problem forces you to think about what the variables mean. The teacher said she’s started doing this in class too—having kids talk through a problem before writing anything down. Not every problem, not every day. But enough to slow the rush.
The other thing that helped was changing my conversation with the teacher. Instead of asking, “How is she doing?” I started asking, “What did you all wonder about this week?” At first, the teacher looked at me like I was speaking another language. Then she told me about a demo she did with a bowling ball and a ramp, and how the kids argued about the speed at the bottom. She said it was one of the better discussions they’d had all year. Then she added, “Of course, we fell behind on the worksheet packet.” I just nodded.
I don’t have a neat answer for what has happened to physics class. I don’t think there’s one villain. It’s a mix of testing pressure, pacing guides, and the fact that it’s easier to measure a correct calculation than a genuine question. But I’ve stopped being sad about it and started being practical. We can’t change the curriculum overnight, but we can make sure that at our kitchen table, physics is still more than an equation.
Last night, my daughter was doing homework again. She said she had to calculate the momentum of a moving truck. Before she wrote anything, she looked up and said, “That’s a lot of force. You wouldn’t want to step in front of it.” Then she solved the problem. The answer was just a number. But the sentence before it was real physics. I’ll take that.
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