How To Teach Physics Online: What I Learned From Starting Small For Middle Schoolers
Last Thursday, I sat at my chipped kitchen table at 4pm, laptop propped on a stack of my kids’ library books, waiting for my 4pm small group to log on. Mia, 13, joined first, a half-eaten cheddar cracker balanced on the edge of her desk, her tabby cat rubbing against her elbow. She’s a competitive cheerleader who failed her last middle school physics quiz and told me two weeks ago, “Physics is just random numbers that have nothing to do with anything I care about.” That day, we were talking about gravity. Instead of pulling up the formula for acceleration, I asked her how hard she lands when she sticks a full flip, compared to stepping off the lowest step of her front porch.
She thought for a second, then said, “Way harder, obviously. I go so much faster.” I told her to grab two things from her desk: something heavy, something light. She came back with a tennis ball and a sticky note pad. I told her to hold them at the same height, drop them at the same time, and tell me what happened. She did, and her eyes went wide. “They hit at the same time? My textbook said that but I thought it was only for science class.”
A year and a half ago, when I first decided I wanted to teach physics online, I wasn’t even sure it could work. I’d spent 7 years teaching physics in a brick-and-mortar high school, then quit to stay home with my two young kids. My oldest hit 8th grade last year, and came home every day complaining that his physics class was all note-taking and memorization, that he’d never use any of it. I started talking to other parents, and almost every one said the same thing: their kids were scared of physics, thought it was only for geniuses, and the remote supplements out there were either boring pre-recorded lectures or expensive kits no one ever used. That’s when I decided to test it out: small groups of middle schoolers, 45 minute lessons once a week, no fancy supplies, just me and whatever they had in their bedrooms.
My first group, I tried to do what I’d always done in person. I made detailed slides, walked through example problems, assigned homework from the textbook. By the third lesson, half the kids weren’t turning on their cameras, and one 12 year old fell asleep mid-lecture. I sat there after the call, staring at my laptop, and realized I was making the same mistake most online science classes make: I was trying to replicate an in-person lecture through a screen, instead of using the fact that we were online to our advantage. When you’re teaching in person, everyone has to use the same supplies in the classroom. When you’re online, every kid is already in their space, full of their own stuff and their own hobbies. I just had to start using that.
I started making three small changes that fixed almost all of the issues I was having. First, I cap every group at four kids, max. No 20 person lectures, where kids can hide and zone out. With four, I can check in with each kid every 5 minutes or so, ask what they’re seeing, what they think, and if someone’s distracted, I can pivot instead of pushing through. Second, every lesson is built around whatever each kid already does. If a kid skateboards after school, we talk about potential energy when we talk about ramps. If a kid bakes with their mom on weekends, we talk about how gas expands when we talk about why cake batter rises. Third, I never ask anyone to buy anything. Every experiment we do uses stuff they already have around the house: rubber bands, soda cans, pieces of paper, tennis balls, even their own bodies. We did a lesson on levers last month where every kid just used a ruler and a pencil from their desk.
Halfway through that gravity lesson with Mia, my 7 year old banged on the kitchen door, yelling that he’d scraped his knee falling off his scooter and needed a band-aid with dinosaurs on it. I apologized to the group, stepped out for two minutes, and when I came back, Mia was already explaining the falling thing to the other kid in the group, who plays basketball. She was saying, “See, when you shoot a free throw, it doesn’t matter how heavy the ball is, gravity pulls it the same amount.” That’s the thing I didn’t expect when I decided to teach online: the messy, ordinary interruptions that people think ruin online lessons actually make them feel more real. If I’d been in a formal classroom, I wouldn’t have stepped out for a kid’s scraped knee that quickly, and Mia wouldn’t have had that unplanned minute to explain what she’d learned to someone else.
A lot of parents ask me if online physics is as good as in-person. It’s not the same, that’s for sure. I can’t grab a kid’s hand to adjust how they’re holding a pendulum, and sometimes the internet cuts out, and sometimes a lesson falls flat. Last week, I planned a whole lesson on friction around a group of boys who all play soccer, we were going to test how cleats grip different surfaces around their houses, and one kid’s internet went out 10 minutes in, another spent half the time chasing his puppy around the living room, and we never got to wrap it up. But after the lesson, his mom texted me that he’d gone outside after the call and tested his cleats on the grass, the driveway, and the sidewalk on his own, and told her he finally got why friction matters.
I still don’t have it all figured out. Some weeks I struggle to make lessons click for a kid who just doesn’t want to be there, and I still get 10 minutes into a lesson before I realize I planned too much for 45 minutes. But what I’ve learned is that teaching physics online doesn’t have to be a poor replacement for in-person learning. It’s just a different way to meet kids where they are, right in their own homes, showing them that physics isn’t just for textbooks or smart kids. It’s why you land hard after a flip, why your cake rises, why your cleats grip the grass. Right now, I’ve got a waiting list of 12 kids, and I’m adding one new group next month. It’s small, it’s messy, and it’s working better than I ever thought it would.
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