I Miss My Physics Class: What It Reminded Me About How Kids Learn Science
The kitchen table had become a disaster zone of crumpled paper and dull pencils. My son Leo, a sophomore, was staring at a worksheet like it had personally insulted him. The problem involved a block sliding down an incline, complete with a little arrow for friction and a question mark where the acceleration should go. He had erased the same spot so many times there was a thin gray smudge on the page.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I’m never going to use this.”
I pulled up a chair, mostly to stop him from snapping his pencil in half. “Let me see.”
The diagram was familiar. A block on a slope. Theta angle. A free-body diagram with vectors pointing every which way. I hadn’t looked at one in over fifteen years, but my hand reached for the pencil almost on its own. I drew a coordinate system, rotated it so the x-axis ran along the slope, and said, “Okay, so the weight is along this line, but it has two parts. One pushes into the ramp. The other pulls it down the ramp.” I paused. “Does that make sense?”
Leo squinted. “How do you know that?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I just remembered.
Mr. Kowalski taught physics at my high school. He was a tall man with a stained lab coat and a habit of knocking things over. On the first day, he stood on a rolling chair and pushed off the wall, gliding across the front of the room while explaining Newton’s first law. “An object in motion stays in motion,” he said, bumping into a filing cabinet. “Unless acted on by an external force. Like this cabinet.”
For months, I didn’t like the class. It was hard. We had to draw diagrams and set up equations, and I was a kid who preferred reading novels. But around the unit on projectiles, something shifted. We launched foam balls across the classroom with a big plastic launcher, and each group had to predict where the ball would land. We measured, we missed, we adjusted. At some point, the formulas stopped being abstract symbols and became a way of knowing what would happen before it happened. That was the most powerful feeling—not that I was smart, but that the world made sense.
Sitting at the kitchen table, watching Leo struggle, I realized something: I missed that class. Not the homework, not the tests, but the actual thinking. The way physics asked me to trust that messy reality could be simplified, examined, and understood. And I think—I know—that’s what Leo was missing too. He wasn’t failing because he was bad at math. He was failing because he couldn’t see the point of the block on the ramp. It was just a drawing.
I tried a different approach. Instead of explaining the formula again, I asked him a question.
“What do you think happens if the ramp is steeper? Not a little steeper—really steep. Like almost vertical.”
“The block slides faster,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because… more gravity pulls it down?”
“Close. It’s not more gravity. It’s that more of gravity’s pull is along the ramp instead of into the ramp. The steepness changes the direction of the pull.”
He looked at the pencil I was holding. I could see him working through it, not memorizing but visualizing. Then he said, “So if the ramp is flat, the force is just into the ramp. There’s nothing pulling it sideways. So no acceleration.”
“Right. Unless you push it.”
He wrote something down. Not the answer yet, but he stopped asking me for the formula. That felt like a small victory. Not because he’d learned physics, but because he’d remembered something about learning itself: that it’s okay to start with a guess, even a wrong one.
The real conversation came later, after he’d finished the problem. He closed the textbook and said, “Why do you know this stuff? You never even use physics.”
I laughed. “I do use it. I just don’t call it physics. When I drive on a wet road, I slow down for the exit ramp. That’s friction and centripetal force. When I’m trying to fit a suitcase into an overhead bin, I tilt it the right way because I’m thinking about the shape and the space. Half of cooking is just heat transfer.”
“Dad, that’s not doing physics.”
“It kind of is. I don’t calculate anything, but I know what’s going to happen. That’s what I miss, honestly. The feeling of knowing why.”
He was quiet. Then he said, “I don’t think I have that.”
“You do. You just haven’t practiced it enough. And you’ve been told for years that physics is a subject you either get or don’t get. It’s not. It’s a skill.”
I’m not a teacher or a child development expert. I’m just a parent who found himself remembering a classroom from twenty years ago. But that moment made me think about how we talk about hard subjects. My daughter, two years older than Leo, once told me she was “not a math person.” She’d said it so casually, like it was a fact. I didn’t correct her then. I wish I had.
After the physics incident, I started doing something small. Every night, after dinner, I’d toss a question onto the table. Not a homework question. Just something odd: “Why does a spoon sound different when you tap it after it’s been in hot water?” or “How does a refrigerator stay cold inside when the room is warm?” Leo looked at me like I was crazy at first. But then he started answering. Some answers were wrong, but he was thinking.
We also got a marble and a bowl from the kitchen. I put a folded towel under one edge of a cutting board to make a ramp, and we rolled the marble off the bottom edge. It hit the floor, left the ramp, and arced. “See,” I said. “That curve is the same as the block problem. It just has time built in.”
He didn’t suddenly love physics. His next test was still rough. But something about the way he talked about it changed. Instead of “I don’t get it,” he started saying, “Can you show me again?” That’s not a huge leap, but it matters.
The other night, we were washing the car. Leo sprayed the hose and the water arced under the streetlight. He watched it fall and said, “That’s projectile motion. It’s like the marble.”
I nodded. I didn’t say anything inspiring. I just let it sit there. Because that’s the thing about learning—it doesn’t happen in a straight line. It happens in drips, in weird moments, in the middle of a messy kitchen or a soapy driveway. It happens when you’re not trying to be good at something, but just curious about it.
I still miss my physics class. I miss the way Mr. Kowalski would lean over my desk and say, “Don’t worry about the number. Worry about whether it makes sense.” That phrase stayed with me. It’s what I try to say to Leo, in my own way.
We haven’t solved the question jar yet. Most of the questions are still unanswered, stuck on slips of paper. Leo adds one every few days. I like that they’re still there, waiting. Maybe that’s what missing a class really means—you miss the permission to be puzzled, to have a problem that doesn’t need to be finished by Friday.
I’m still waiting for Leo to ask one that I can’t answer. He already did, actually. He asked, “Why do we learn this if we’re going to forget it?”
I didn’t have a good answer that night. I still don’t. But I told him what I felt: that forgetting the formulas is fine, but forgetting how to look at something and wonder why is not. He shrugged. Then he asked if we could get fast food for dinner.
I think that’s okay. We’re not in a movie. He has a test tomorrow, and I have a feeling the block on the ramp will win that battle. But next time, maybe he’ll ask for a real example before he gives up. That’s the thing I miss about physics—not the certainty of the answer, but the chance to be wrong and still keep going.
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