What Happened to Physics Class? A Teacher’s Perspective on Today’s Science Lessons
The first time I walked into my son’s physics classroom, I nearly asked if I was in the wrong room. There was no chalkboard, no rows of desks facing a lecture table, no equation-covered whiteboards. Instead, kids were clustered around low tables where pieces of PVC pipe, little motors, and something that looked suspiciously like a fan blade sat in piles. One group was sketching on a large sheet of paper, arguing about angles. Another group was taping a straw to a balloon. My son was staring at a laptop screen with two other kids, all three of them waiting for a graph to finish loading.
That was not physics class. Not the physics class I remembered.
I’m a teacher myself, but not in the sciences. I teach history. So I have a pretty clear memory of what physics was when I took it in high school: the teacher at the board, working through incline-plane problems step by step. We copied notes. We memorized formulas. We solved word problems about trains colliding and balls rolling off tables. The lab was an afterthought, mostly verification—if everything went right, you got the expected answer and wrote it up. There was a quiet order to it, and I did fine, but I couldn’t have told you what any of it meant in the real world.
So I was curious, and a little suspicious, when I sat down with my son’s physics teacher, Ms. Delgado, during parent-teacher night. She’s younger than I am, maybe thirty, and she has that calm energy you see in people who genuinely like teenagers. I asked her, a little cautiously, what her students were actually doing that day with the straws and balloons.
She smiled and said, “They’re building a model to show how a rocket works. They have to design a launch that can carry a payload—a raw egg—at least three meters without breaking. Right now they’re figuring out how much force the air compression gives, and they’re realizing it’s not enough, so they’re designing something else.”
I blinked. “But when do they learn the equations?”
“They do,” she said. “But we start with the problem, not the formula. By the time they need the math, they’ve already felt why it matters. Then they do the calculation to make their design better—or to figure out why the last one failed.”
That stuck with me. I later asked my son if he felt like he was learning “real” physics, or just doing projects. He shrugged and said, “We do math every day. But it’s not like boring math. It’s like, we have to figure out how fast the egg is going when it hits the ground. So you have to use the formula, but you’re using it because you want to know something.”
That answer annoyed me a little, because it made sense. And it made me uncomfortable.
I teach history the old way, mostly. I lecture, I assign readings, we write essays. I don’t build mud-walled forts to teach medieval warfare. But my kids have grown up in a different world. They’ve had phones in their hands since before they could read. They have constant access to information, which means memorizing facts feels pointless to them. And they’ve been trained by video games and YouTube tutorials to expect that if something doesn’t work, you tweak it and try again—not erase the page and start over.
Physics class seems to have made peace with that. Ms. Delgado explained that her goal is not to produce future engineers—though some come out that way—but to get every kid to see physics as a way of thinking, not a pile of formulas. She said something that I’ve been turning over in my head since: “When they’re fourteen, they don’t care about the coefficient of friction. They care if their car wins the race. But to get the car to go faster, they have to engage with friction. The formula becomes a tool, not a task.”
That’s the core of it. Physics class has shifted from a subject you absorb to a subject you practice. It’s based on phenomenon—real, visible, sometimes messy situations. Kids are asked to predict, test, fail, and revise. That’s not just educational jargon. I saw it in my son’s notebooks. There were pages of wrong numbers, crossed-out diagrams, and little notes in the margins like “This is why the wheel didn’t turn” and “Try more mass.” That kind of thinking used to be reserved for advanced labs or science fairs. Now it’s a Tuesday afternoon in a public school.
But this shift isn’t without friction, and not just in the physics sense.
For one thing, it’s harder to grade. A worksheet has a right answer. A launched egg is a success or a splat. But the thinking behind the design—the trade-offs, the reasoning, the willingness to change course—that’s harder to measure. Teachers have to use rubrics, student reflections, and a lot of in-person observation. That takes time and energy, and it’s not always reliable.
Parents have a hard time with it, too. I’m in that group. When my son brings home a project and tells me he didn’t get a grade yet because his group is still “iterating,” I feel a flash of panic. What does “iterating” mean, and when will I see a report card? It feels less concrete than the physics I grew up with, even if I suspect it’s more useful.
There’s also the question of whether this approach actually teaches the material. I asked Ms. Delgado about test scores. She said the district tests show her students do about the same on standard mechanics questions as students in a more traditional class. But they do significantly better on questions that ask them to apply concepts to a new situation—the kinds of questions that were always labeled “challenge” in my own textbooks.
That’s the part that convinces me something good is happening, even if it’s uncomfortable.
But it’s not a perfect fix. Some kids, especially those who thrive on structure and clear instructions, feel lost in a project-based classroom. My other son, the ninth grader, is like that. He spends his physics class working on a water-filter design project right now, and he comes home frustrated because his group can’t agree on a prototype. He told me the other day, “I just want the teacher to tell me if I’m doing it right.” I think there’s real value in that discomfort, but I also think schools need to support those kids—giving them checkpoints, mini-lessons, or at least a regular chance to step back and see the big picture.
For parents who want to help, I’ve learned a few practical things. The biggest is to stop asking “What did you learn in physics today?” and start asking “What problem are you trying to solve?” That gets a real answer, because it’s the language the kids are using now. Another useful move is to ask your child to explain how something works—not a formula, but an object, like a toilet or a car door. The physics is hiding in there, and explaining it out loud helps them connect everyday experience to the abstract concepts.
If your kid is struggling, don’t assume they’re “bad at physics.” They may just be bad at open-ended work. That’s different, and it’s more fixable. Ask them if they’d prefer to do one part of the project alone first, or if they need the teacher to give them a clearer starting point. Often they just need permission to ask for structure, because the class culture can make it feel like admitting defeat.
I still don’t fully understand what goes on in that classroom. When I watch my son’s group work, I sometimes see moments of real confusion, arguing, and dead ends. But I also see sixteen-year-olds talking about acceleration like it’s a friend they’ve met—not a stranger they’ve been introduced to on a worksheet. That wasn’t my experience, and I can’t decide if that’s a generation gap or an actual improvement.
Ms. Delgado says she doesn’t think of it as her job to make kids love physics. She just wants them to leave knowing that physics is something they can do, not something that happens to other people. That’s a modest goal, and I appreciate it for being more honest than the posters on the wall.
My son still can’t tell me the speed of light without looking it up. He also can’t tell me why his rocket went sideways instead of up. But he spent an entire evening drawing a force diagram on the back of a receipt, trying to figure it out. I never once did that in high school. So maybe the answer to what happened to physics class is that it became something weird and messy and alive—like most of learning, actually, when you stop pretending it’s a set of answers.
I’m still getting used to that. But I can see it working. I just wish my other son could get a little more structure, and I wish I could peek into the classroom more often to satisfy my own curiosity. For now, I’ll settle for listening to the arguments about straws and balloons from the next room. They sound like learning, even when they don’t sound like physics.
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