I Think I Miss My Physics Class, and It Made Me Rethink How My Kids Learn
The other day, I found my daughter’s science notebook on the kitchen counter, the pages warped from a spilled water bottle. She’s in eighth grade now, and the notebook is from last year’s physical science unit. I flipped through it and saw her notes on Newton’s laws, doodled diagrams of forces, and at the back, a half-written lab report about pendulums. That’s when it hit me—I think I miss my physics class.
I didn’t like physics when I took it. It was junior year, and the teacher, Mr. Aldridge, had a habit of ending every explanation with “Does that make sense?” before anyone could actually process it. I was in the back row, trying to keep up, mostly writing down formulas I didn’t fully understand. I passed with a B-minus, and I remember thinking I’d never need any of it again.
So why did that notebook make me feel something? Maybe because it reminded me of a specific afternoon in that same class—the one where everything didn’t make sense, but I suddenly saw why it mattered.
We were learning about momentum, and Mr. Aldridge brought in a skateboard. He had one of the track kids sit on it, threw him a medicine ball, and had him throw it back. The kid moved backward each time, and we all laughed. Then Mr. Aldridge sat on the skateboard himself—he was not a small man—and asked the smallest girl in the front row to throw him the ball. She did, and he rolled halfway across the room. “You know what you just did?” he said. “You accelerated a two-hundred-pound guy with a two-pound ball.”
That stuck with me. Not because I suddenly understood momentum on an equation level, but because I saw it. The invisible became visible. For the rest of the year, I looked for those moments—the little demonstrations, the everyday objects that became physics. I never loved the problem sets, and I still can’t explain quantum anything. But I liked the way physics made ordinary things seem like small miracles.
When I look at my own kids now, I see that happening less and less. My daughter doesn’t talk about what she learns in science class; she talks about the grades, the due dates, whether her teacher is “nice.” When I ask what they did in class, I get the universal answer: “Nothing.” But her notebook was full of something. She had drawn arrows on a picture of a roller coaster and wrote “velocity = speed + direction” in the margin. I realized she probably understood more than she lets on.
I think part of why I miss physics is that it was one of the few subjects where I got to be confused in a safe way. There was a right answer, but getting there required making wrong guesses. I remember sitting with a study group, arguing about how a pendulum’s period changes if you change the mass—it doesn’t, apparently—and someone finally shouting “Let’s just Google it,” and everyone being stunned. That moment of collective surprise is a kind of learning you don’t really get from a lecture.
As a parent, I don’t want to force that on my kids. But I do want to notice when they’re on the edge of that kind of engagement. The other day, my youngest asked why a shadow gets shorter at noon. I had no idea, and instead of brushing it off, I said, “I don’t know. What do you think?” We sat on the front steps and guessed. He said maybe the sun goes up, so the light presses the shadow down. It wasn’t right, but it was a hypothesis. We looked it up on my phone, and suddenly we were talking about angles and time of day. He lost interest after two minutes and went to find a ball, but the moment was there.
Something else I’ve started doing is asking my kids to teach me something—not a recap of their homework, just a thing they found interesting. My daughter taught me about the Doppler effect using the microwave door alarm as an example. She said, “The sound gets closer and then further,” and I thought, that’s exactly it. She didn’t have the formula, but she had the pattern. That counts for a lot.
Teachers can do this too, I think, even without a skateboard. It’s low-pressure stuff: asking “What do you notice?” before “What do you know?” Helping kids connect a concept to something they already see—music videos, cooking, a swinging sign. Physics might be the easiest subject for this because it’s literally everywhere. But the principle applies to any subject: memory isn’t the only goal. Recognition—“oh, that’s that thing we saw”—can stick longer than a test score.
I’m not about to start a nightly physics ritual. I don’t want to turn every question into a lesson. My kids get bored with that fast. But I’m paying more attention to the small moments when they’re actually thinking about something, even if they don’t have the words yet. And I’m a little more honest with myself about the fact that I miss being in a classroom where the answer was hidden, and you had to wait to see it.
Maybe that’s the real insight: missing a subject isn’t always about liking the subject. It’s about missing the version of yourself that was allowed to be curious without being efficient. Kids get that in school sometimes, but not always. Sometimes they need a parent to sit on the front steps and guess about shadows, or to find an old notebook and remember what it felt like to almost understand.
My daughter’s notebook is back on the shelf now. She’s in chemistry this year, and she says it’s fine. I don’t know if the physical science year will leave a mark on her the way physics left a mark on me. But I saw those doodles, those half-finished labs. I know something was happening in there. I just have to trust that it was.
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