What Has Happened to Physics Class? A Teacher’s View on Why Kids Are Losing Interest
I remember the day I noticed it clearly. I was standing at the front of the room, walking through the steps of a projectile motion problem. A student in the third row had his chin resting on his palm, staring at the projected slide like it was a low-battery warning on his phone. Another was doodling in the margin of their notebook. The lesson wasn’t bad. The equations were correct. I was explaining why a ball thrown horizontally and a ball dropped from the same height hit the ground at the same time—which, honestly, is a wild idea when you first hear it.
But no one looked surprised. No one asked, “Wait, really?” Nobody wanted to see it happen.
I used to love that moment. The little spark of disbelief when someone first realizes the world doesn’t work the way they assumed. These days, I’m more likely to hear, “Is this on the test?” or “Can you just give us the formula sheet?” And honestly, I can’t blame them. Somewhere along the way, physics class stopped feeling like an invitation to wonder and started feeling like a very long set of instructions for problems we’d never actually encounter outside the classroom.
It wasn’t always this way. When I first started teaching, I had bins of springs, ramps, and pendulums stacked in the corner. Kids would come in early just to poke at the equipment, guessing which experiment we’d try that day. We built paper roller coasters to study energy. We measured the speed of toy cars on ramps and argued about why lighter cars didn’t always go faster. There was noise. There was mess. There were questions that didn’t have right answers.
Now much of that is gone. Not because I decided it wasn’t important, but because it slowly got squeezed out. The state exam doesn’t ask about the joy of discovering that the angle of a ramp changes how far a cart rolls. It asks about net force, acceleration, and free-body diagrams. So we practice those. Endlessly. My energy goes into making sure every student can interpret a graph or calculate a slope. And they’re getting better at it. I just don’t always feel like I’m teaching them the thing that made me fall in love with physics in the first place.
Maybe that’s what breaks my heart the most. The subject hasn’t become irrelevant—it’s become sterile. We’ve sanitized the science. We removed the struggle of setting up an experiment, the patience it takes to get good data, the humility you feel when your results don’t match your hypothesis. In its place, we’ve built a curriculum that’s efficient, predictable, and manageable. But it’s also deeply forgettable. I can’t tell you how many former students come back and say they remember the balloon car project. I can’t remember a single one who said they missed the multiple-choice quizzes.
This isn’t just a problem in my classroom. Every year at the physics teacher conference, you hear the same stories. Teachers who want to do labs but can’t because the shared science room is booked solid by biology. Teachers who have to turn down building materials because there’s no budget line for them. Teachers whose administrators walk in during a lab and ask, “How is this aligned to the standard?”—as if watching a cart roll down a plank can’t possibly teach you anything unless a worksheet is attached. We’ve built an environment where the safest teaching is the quietest teaching. And the quietest teaching is usually just someone at the front talking while everyone else copies notes.
But I’ve started to notice something small shifting. Maybe it’s happening in your house, too. Parents are asking more questions. They want to know why their kids are mumbling through homework about power and voltage without any idea what the inside of a flashlight looks like. They’re noticing that physics is becoming a gatekeeper course—the one where a student’s entire future feels uncertain because of one difficult midterm. And they’re starting to wonder whether the goal is really to understand the universe or just to sort kids into categories.
One of the best conversations I had this year was with a mom whose daughter was failing physics. She wasn’t calling to yell at me. She was calling to ask, sincerely, what her daughter should do. We talked about videos online of slow-motion collisions. We talked about simple things she could do at home with a basketball and a tennis ball to show how energy transfers. Her daughter wasn’t suddenly a physics genius, but she did start passing. Not because she memorized more formulas, but because she remembered that the world under her feet actually behaves in interesting ways. That’s the entry point. That’s the hook.
We don’t need to bring back every science fair or buy millions of dollars of gear. We need the small things. If you have a kid who’s swimming through physics class or drowning in it, try asking them a question you don’t know the answer to. Not “what did you learn today?” but “why do you think a feather falls slower than a brick on earth but faster than a brick on the moon?” Then don’t leap in to correct them. Let them sit with it. Weirdly, the discomfort of not knowing is the most powerful tool we have in science education. We’ve been trying to eliminate that discomfort with detailed lecture slides and step-by-step videos. But the kids who thrive are the ones who learn to sit in that uncertainty for a minute and then go chase the answer themselves.
I’ve started building a few minutes of “free physics time” into my classes. One day a week, we put down the worksheets and just look at something ordinary. A rubber band stretched and released. A coin spinning on a table. A bicycle wheel from somebody’s garage. I don’t tell them what to notice. I just ask them what happened. Then I ask why. It feels almost too loose, too unstructured. But when I see a student light up and say, “Wait, why is there a dark spot on the road after it rains, but not somewhere else?” I’m pretty sure we’re getting closer.
I’m not pretending I’ve solved it. Next month, I’ll be back to cramming before a practice test, and some of this magic will evaporate. The curriculum won’t change overnight. The school system has its own gravity. But I think about that mom calling me, and I realize something important. Physics class hasn’t entirely disappeared. It’s just waiting for someone to make it physically present again. A hundred times a year, a kid sees a bouncing ball or a burning match and has a genuine scientific question. If we can just keep that question alive—at home, in passing, in a quick Thursday demonstration—then maybe the formulas will eventually find their place again as a way to describe something real.
Last week, my third-row student—the one who was doodling—came up after class. He doesn’t do that often. He looked at the whiteboard and asked, half-casually, “So if I throw a paper airplane out a bus window, does the air actually push it back, or does the bus just move away from it?” It wasn’t the neatest question. It was a little messy, like most good ones are. But I answered, and then I asked him to bring one of his paper airplanes to class the next day. He raised an eyebrow. Said “okay” like it meant nothing. I know the moment might not turn into anything. He might never love projectile motion. But for a second, physics was something in his hands, not just something on a screen. That’s where it still starts. I just forget that sometimes, and maybe the whole system does too.
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