How I Decided To Start Teaching Physics Online (And What No One Tells You About Making It Work For Kids)
Last March, I sat at my crayon-marked kitchen table, cold oat latte sweating next to my laptop, staring at 12-year-old Jax’s pixelated face on Zoom. His mom had texted me the week before: he failed his middle school physical science midterm, says physics is “just boring formulas that don’t matter,” and wondered if I’d be willing to tutor him online. I’d been toying with the idea of teaching physics online part-time for months — I’d left full-time high school classroom teaching two years earlier to stay home with my two young kids, and I missed working with students one-on-one — but this was my first trial.
Jax twisted a blue fidget spinner the whole time I talked, his background a wrinkled Fortnite poster taped to his bedroom wall. I started with the pulley lesson he needed for his retest, holding up my hand-drawn diagram to the webcam, and after five minutes he just sighed and said, “When am I ever gonna use this anyway?” I was about to launch into the “you need it for high school” speech I’d given a hundred times in the classroom, when he mentioned he and his dad had spent all last Saturday trying to yank his dad’s ATV out of a muddy ditch behind their house. They tied a rope to a tree, pulled as hard as they could, and nothing happened. Then his dad wrapped the rope around the tree branch three times, and they pulled it out easy. “Why’d that work?” he asked.
I set down my textbook notes, closed the practice test packet, and we spent the rest of the 30 minutes talking about his ATV. I asked him to grab a pencil, a water bottle, and a rubber band from his desk, and we tested how adding more wraps around the bottle changed how much force he needed to pull the rubber band. He worked it out himself — the extra wraps add friction, which keeps the rope from slipping, so you don’t have to pull as hard. That’s exactly the mechanical advantage concept he was supposed to learn for pulleys. Half an hour later, he leaned back in his chair and said, “Oh, that’s what that stupid diagram meant.”
That moment changed how I thought about teaching physics online. I’d spent weeks worrying about what I needed to get started: a fancy website, expensive lab kits to ship to students, a polished learning management system, all the things generic education blogs said I needed. But sitting there that day, with my old beagle napping under the table and Jax testing friction on his water bottle, I realized none of that mattered. The biggest problem kids have with physics isn’t that it’s hard — it’s that it’s taught as something disconnected from their lives, and online teaching can actually fix that easier than a crowded classroom can.
A month later, I picked up a second student, a 10th grader named Lila who was failing AP Physics 1 and couldn’t keep up with her teacher’s 30-person in-person class. I posted about my new online tutoring in our local parent Facebook group, charged $40 a session, which is half what the big national tutoring chains charge, and got three more inquiries within a week. I didn’t need to spend anything on advertising, just one post to a group of local parents who were all looking for extra help for their kids.
I’ve picked up a few small tricks that work way better than any fancy equipment I could have bought. First, I start every class with 10 minutes of what I call “your life physics.” I ask every student to come with one thing they noticed that week that made them go “why did that happen?” It could be why their skateboard stops faster on grass than pavement, why their soda fizzes over when they shake it, anything. That 10 minutes connects what we’re doing that day to something they care about, before we ever touch a textbook or practice problem. Second, I never ask parents to buy special supplies. Any demo we do uses stuff the student already has within arm’s reach: water bottles, paper, pencils, cereal bowls, socks. Last month we did a buoyancy lesson with a bar of soap and a cereal bowl, and it worked just as well as any lab I did in a high school classroom. Third, I keep all sessions under 45 minutes, with a 2 minute break halfway through. I do 30 minutes for middle school, 45 for high school. Online attention fades way faster than it does in person, so cramming too much into an hour just means kids zone out for the last 20 minutes. The two minute break is simple: I tell them to stand up, jump twice, and get a drink of water, and come right back. It takes almost no time, but it resets their focus.
It’s not perfect. Last week my 3-year-old burst into the kitchen mid-session with her underwear in her hand, covered in glitter toothpaste she’d squeezed all over the bathroom. Another time my internet cut out 10 minutes before the end of class, and we finished over FaceTime. I only have eight students right now, and that’s enough. I don’t want to grow it into a big business; I just want something that fits around school drop-offs and soccer practice and doctor’s appointments for my kids.
Jax got a B on his physics final last semester, and he still sends me quick texts sometimes — last week it was a photo of a broken roller coaster at the county fair, with the text “what do you think went wrong with the forces here?” Lila just got a C+ on her last AP test, up from a D, and her mom said she’s stopped saying she’s going to drop physics. I still don’t have a fancy website, I still take payments through Venmo, and I still do all my classes from my crayon-marked kitchen table. If you’re someone like me, who loves physics and wants to teach it online without quitting your life or spending a thousand dollars getting set up, it doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to meet kids where they are. Right now, that’s working for me, and I’m not in any hurry to change it.
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