When My Kid’s Physics Homework Made Me Miss My Old Physics Class
The kitchen table was covered in crumpled paper. My fifteen-year-old son, Leo, had a worksheet in front of him, a pencil behind his ear, and the kind of stare that suggested he’d rather be anywhere else. I sat down with my tea, ready to offer the usual parental support—which mostly meant sitting there and nodding. Then I glanced at the problem.
“A ball is thrown horizontally from the top of a 45-meter cliff. It lands 20 meters from the base. What is the initial velocity?”
I laughed. “I have no idea how to do this.” Leo shrugged. “Me neither.”
But instead of just letting him Google the answer, I leaned over and looked closer. Something stirred. I remembered a chalkboard, a tall teacher with glasses, and a diagram of a ball flying off a cliff. I remembered the word projectile. I remembered thinking it was the closest thing to magic I’d seen in school.
“Wait,” I said, picking up the pencil. “I think… you separate the vertical and horizontal motion.” Leo looked at me, mildly surprised. I started writing numbers. I got the time from the vertical drop—something about t equals square root of twice the distance over gravity. It was coming back slowly, like the name of an old song.
I wasn’t sure I was right. But for a few minutes, I was fifteen again, fully in it. The ball, the cliff, the numbers all had a quiet order. When I looked up, Leo was actually watching me.
“You like this?” he asked.
“I think I miss my physics class,” I said.
From there, we did something I hadn’t planned. We didn’t just use the formula and move on. I pulled out my phone and typed “projectile motion explained simply” into a search bar. Leo and I watched a short video about a girl throwing paper airplanes off a balcony. We rewound it a few times. I still wasn’t completely sure about the equation, but we worked through the problem together—me asking “What do you think happens after the ball leaves the cliff?” and Leo saying, “It falls, but it also keeps moving forward.”
That’s the part I almost missed. Not the formulas or the tests, but the weird thrill of realizing that two things happen at the same time. That’s what physics was for me, once. Not a hard subject. Just a way of describing the obvious world in ways that suddenly felt less obvious.
Here’s what I learned that evening, as a parent sitting at a messy table: we tend to tell kids that certain subjects aren’t for us. “I was never a math person” or “Physics was too hard for me.” And often we say it to be relatable, to comfort our kids when they struggle. But it can also send a quiet message—that being bad at something is a permanent trait, not just a moment in time.
Leo said he thought physics was for people who were already good at algebra. I told him I’d failed a couple of quizzes back in high school. He looked almost relieved.
We spent another twenty minutes on the next problem—a ramp, a rolling marble, some angle I kept misreading. I didn’t need to be the expert. I needed to be the one who was willing to try again. There’s something useful about a parent who says, “I don’t remember this, but let’s figure it out together.” It’s more honest, and honestly, it’s more helpful.
If you’re a parent facing homework in a subject you’ve forgotten, here are some things that actually worked for us:
First, start with the problem itself, not with your own fear. Don’t say “Oh, I was terrible at this.” Just look at the problem and read it out loud. Sometimes that alone helps a child slow down.
Second, ask questions without knowing the answer. “What do you think the ball is doing at this point?” “Does anything keep pushing it sideways after it leaves the cliff?” You’re not pretending to know more than your kid. You’re showing that thinking is the point. You’re modeling what it looks like to be confused and still curious.
Third, use your phone as a tool, not a shortcut. Look up a short video or a simple diagram. We found a NASA page about how spacecraft move in curved paths—sort of the same idea as Leo’s ball, but way cooler. Leo watched it twice.
Fourth, let your child teach you. At one point, Leo explained to me why the vertical distance doesn’t depend on the horizontal speed. He got it partly right, partly wrong. But I let him explain, and I asked follow-up questions. He told me he liked being the one who knew something. I think that’s a feeling we should protect, especially in subjects kids are told they’re bad at.
I’m not writing this because I’ve now got a kid who loves physics. I don’t. He did the worksheet, closed the notebook, and went to play a video game. But something shifted. Later that week, he asked me if I knew why satellites don’t fall. I told him I wasn’t sure. We looked it up together while I stirred pasta sauce.
I think the moment I said “I think I miss my physics class” surprised me because I’d never talked about school like that. I was the sort of student who just got through it. Yet here I am, middle-aged, revisiting projectile motion because my kid needed help and I found myself genuinely interested.
I don’t have a neat conclusion. The table is still messy sometimes. Leo still says he finds physics “annoying.” But last Tuesday, he asked if we could watch a video on how roller coasters work. That felt like something. Maybe it was just one good evening, or maybe it was the start of him seeing school subjects as less separate from real life.
Either way, I’m not going to tell him I’ve got the equations memorized. Because I don’t. I’m just going to keep sitting down at the table and looking at the problem—even when I’m pretty sure I’ll get it wrong. That’s probably the lesson I needed to relearn anyway: it’s okay to not know, as long as you’re still willing to look.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » When My Kid’s Physics Homework Made Me Miss My Old Physics Class