by Raymond Burns | Apr 22, 2024 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
We’re all beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Often, students think they’re the only ones looking towards it, but they don’t realize that nobody is gazing at that light more intently than the teachers. Some of us are now jogging...
by Raymond Burns | Apr 22, 2024 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
Let me start by saying that as a student, I absolutely despised summer assignments. Teachers would assign multiple books to read and hand out worksheet packets as thick as a book. Then, two days before summer ended, I’d be frantically calling my friends and...
by Raymond Burns | Jan 3, 2024 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
As a kid in public school, not surprisingly, science was a class I enjoyed more than most. However, I hated how it seemed that almost every year, I felt like I was being lied to. It was very common to hear, “Remember when your teacher told you that a force is a push...
by Raymond Burns | Jan 1, 2024 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
In my first year of teaching, I implemented a rule in my school district: if students finished their physics lab early, they could leave and go to lunch. A few months later, my supervisor disagreed with this approach, and I had to break the news to my students....
by Raymond Burns | Dec 19, 2023 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
It was Christmas Eve of 2019, and although the holiday break was going great, my mind kept circling back to work—specifically, the looming task of using the copy machine on January 2nd. Past experiences taught me that many teachers would be scrambling to make copies...
by Raymond Burns | Oct 31, 2023 | General Tips for Teaching Physics
It’s my first year of college physics, and I’m performing about as well as the average student in the class, which means I’m not doing very well—I’m failing. This class is undeniably challenging, and I’m struggling to figure out how to improve my situation. After...