How I Started Teaching Physics Online (What Parents Should Know Before Booking Sessions)
The 13-year-old on my screen has a half-eaten strawberry Pop-Tart propped on his desk, his hood pulled up over messy brown hair, and he’s already sighed three times in the first two minutes. It’s our 30-minute trial session last month, and when I ask what part of his current unit he’s stuck on, he shrugs and says, “All of it. Projectile motion is stupid. I’m never gonna throw a ball off a cliff anyway.”
My cat rubs against my ankle under the kitchen table where I set up my laptop, and I take a sip of lukewarm coffee from my chipped college physics mug. I don’t argue with him. I’d heard the same line dozens of times when I taught full-time at the local public high school, and it’s one of the reasons I decided I wanted to teach physics online instead, working one-on-one with kids who’ve already checked out in a crowded classroom.
I quit my full-time job two years ago, after the third parent that semester told me they couldn’t afford the $120 an hour the big tutoring chains charged for physics help. Most of the kids who reached out to me were just bored or lost, not bad at science. They’d been taught to memorize formulas for tests, not see how physics works in the stuff they care about. I wanted to try something smaller, more flexible, that fit around their schedules instead of the other way around. Online made sense: kids don’t have to drive across town after school, they can meet from their bedroom or the kitchen table, no need to clean up the room or change out of their hoodie.
Back to Javi. I pull up a 10-second clip of the video game he’d mentioned he plays every weekend, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where he’s shooting an arrow from a high cliff at an enemy camp below. “Why do you have to aim a little above the camp to hit it, instead of right at it?” I ask. He leans forward a little, Pop-Tart forgotten. “Because gravity pulls it down, right?” We pull up the interactive whiteboard, and he draws the arc of the arrow right on his own screen. Ten minutes later, he’s plugged the numbers into the exact same projectile motion formula he couldn’t wrap his head around in class, and he blinks when he realizes he got the right answer.
That’s the thing no one tells you about learning physics online: it doesn’t have to be less engaging than in-person learning. It just has to meet the kid where they are. After two years of doing this, I’ve picked up a few small, low-effort things that work way better than rigid rules, and I wish more parents knew they don’t have to overcomplicate it.
First, you don’t need a fancy desk or a perfect study space for online physics. Half my kids have pets wandering through the background, or a sibling popping in to grab a snack, and that’s fine. I’d rather a kid be comfortable than stressed about keeping a perfectly clean space for a tutor. I always recommend parents ask the teacher to split sessions into 25-minute blocks with a 5-minute stretch break, instead of forcing a full hour straight if your kid zones out easily. That’s a small adjustment most online teachers will agree to, and it makes a huge difference for kids who struggle to sit still after a full day of sitting in class.
Second, always tell the teacher what your kid already cares about outside of school, and ask them to tie problems to that. If your kid skates, do centripetal force with turns on a half-pipe. If they love taking selfies, talk about light refraction through phone camera lenses. If they build Legos, calculate load on the bridge they built. Physics isn’t just for cliffs and textbook problems—it’s everything, and most online teachers can adjust to that easily if you give them the context upfront.
Third, check that your teacher uses an interactive whiteboard that your kid can draw on, not just a pre-made slideshow. The biggest mistake I see new online physics teachers make is just talking at the kid the whole time, same as a classroom lecture. Drawing through problems together, letting the kid mess up and erase and try again on the screen, makes it feel way more like working through it together on paper at a kitchen table, not just listening to a lecture.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Sometimes kids won’t turn their camera on, and I can’t force them. Sometimes the internet cuts out mid-problem, and we have to reschedule. Last week I accidentally shared my grocery list instead of a problem set, and we spent five minutes laughing about how I still need to pick up more oat milk. I don’t pretend online physics teaching works for every kid—some really do need in-person, hands-on lab work to click, and I tell parents that upfront.
Right now, I have nine regular students a week, and I’m adding two more slots next month. Javi books an hour every Wednesday after school, and last week he told me he got a B on his last physics test, his first passing grade all year. He still thinks throwing balls off cliffs is stupid, but he doesn’t think physics is stupid anymore. I still fumble with Zoom controls sometimes, and I still haven’t figured out how to keep my cat from walking across my keyboard mid-session. It’s messy, it’s small, but it’s working for the kids that come to me, and that’s enough for right now. I’m still figuring the rest out as I go.
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