What Has Happened to Physics Class? One Teacher Explains Why the Formulas Come Later
My daughter dropped her backpack on the kitchen floor and said, “We didn’t do any physics today.” I teach physics down the hall. So I knew better than to argue right away.
“Okay, what did you do?”
“We rolled a marble down a ramp and put a little tick thing on it. Then we made a graph. Then we had to write a paragraph about what the graph meant.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. I thought: You did physics. The graph is the story of the marble speeding up. The paragraph is you trying to understand that story.
But I also understood why she didn’t call it physics. In her mind, physics is supposed to come in equations. It’s supposed to plug in numbers and solve for x. That’s how it was for me. When I was in ninth grade, physics meant a formula sheet and a calculator. We memorized “velocity equals distance over time” and then spent the next six weeks doing variations. If you could remember which letter went where, you passed. It was clean. It was also mostly pointless.
Her class isn’t that anymore.
Something happened in the last fifteen years. Science teaching moved away from “learn the law, then apply it” and toward “watch what happens, then make sense of it.” Kids still learn the laws. But they don’t meet them at the beginning of the unit. They meet them at the end, after they’ve spent a few days watching something odd happen. The formula feels more like a reward than a starting line.
I have to be honest: I didn’t like this at first. When I looked over her lab write-up, I saw a lot of blank space for something called “Reasoning.” I was ready to tell her to just put the equation down and move on. But her teacher showed me something that changed my thinking.
She gave an example: “Ask ten kids to calculate the density of a block. Most will do it because you told them. Now ask ten kids to sort five objects by materials using only their hands. They’ll talk about how this one feels ‘heavy for its size.’ That is density, but they don’t know it yet. When we show the graph with mass on the vertical axis and volume on the horizontal axis, they see it themselves.” The math comes after the idea.
That sounds good in theory. In practice, it makes homework a lot less familiar.
Last week, her assignment was a pendulum investigation. She hung a washer on a string, counted how many swings happened in fifteen seconds, changed the length, repeated it, and put her numbers in a data table. The instructions said to write a claim, evidence, and reasoning. She was stuck. “What is the claim? It swings faster when it’s shorter? Everyone knows that.” I almost said, “Then write that.” But I stopped. I asked, “What does your data table show?” She showed me. The short string had nineteen swings. The long string had eleven. I asked, “If you made the string twice as long, would you get five swings or nine?” She didn’t know. That’s physics. That gap between what you’d guess and what you’d measure is the whole point.
I think a lot of parents get confused at this exact moment. They look at assignments that ask for “observations” and “claims” and wonder why the teacher didn’t just hand over the formula. It’s because the problem they’re learning to solve isn’t “what number goes in the equation.” It’s “what pattern exists in the world, and why does it exist?” That’s a much harder skill. It also takes a lot longer to build.
So, what can you do at the kitchen table?
First, don’t panic if your kid says “we didn’t learn anything” or “we just did a lab.” Ask them to tell you what they did in three steps. What did they set up? What did they measure? What did they see? If they can answer those three, they learned something. The name and equation will catch up.
Second, ask them the kind of question that connects the lab to ordinary life. If they measured how fast a cart moved while increasing force, ask: “If we tied your shoes to that cart instead, would the graph look the same? What about if we pushed twice as hard?” This doesn’t require you to know physics. You’re only asking them to transfer the idea. That’s where the understanding actually shows up.
Third, when you see “Claim, Evidence, Reasoning” on the page, don’t turn it into a grammar lesson. Read it like a detective story. The claim is the answer to the question. The evidence is the data. The reasoning is the part where they try to explain why the data tells the truth. You can help by saying, “Okay, if that’s your claim, show me the exact part of the graph that made you think so.” They’ll either point to something or realize they need to look again.
In my own classroom, I try to make the shift a little smoother than it was for her. At the end of a lab, I name the physics out loud. “What you just watched, that marble speeding up, that’s acceleration due to gravity. We’re going to write the formula for it tomorrow.” Just saying that out loud matters. Without it, kids genuinely think they spent the day rolling toys. With it, the experience and the mathematics connect.
But I also keep one old-school practice: I give them problems. Not after every lab, and not before they’ve seen the phenomenon, but in the middle and at the end. There’s a reason students still need to practice calculations. It teaches them to check their work and to see the limits of the formula. The algebra is not the enemy. It’s just no longer the first thing.
I can’t say this revolution in physics class has been easy for families. Most of us grew up thinking science was what you solved, not what you noticed. When your eighth grader says “we didn’t do anything today, we just collected data,” it sounds like the class is wasting time. It isn’t. It’s slow on purpose. The system is designed to let kids sit with confusion longer, because that’s where the actual learning happens.
So the next time your child pushes back on an assignment that asks them to explain something instead of calculate it, try not to say, “In my day, we just did problems.” Instead, ask them to show you what they saw. Let them be the expert. It throws them off at first, but after a while, they start to own the concepts in a way I never did at their age.
I still miss the clean formula sheets once in a while. And not every lab is brilliant. Some are badly designed, and some kids just copy from each other. It’s not a perfect system. But standing in my kitchen, watching my daughter explain a marble graph with her own words, I started to think that the formula didn’t matter as much as I used to believe. What mattered was that she saw the pattern and knew it was real before anyone gave it a name. That might be enough.
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