First Entry

Not much to say in the first entry. Today I walked my AP class through the formulas of constant acceleration and free fall, and then tried to keep that same pace with my honors class. The big differences between the two classes are 1) the AP students have mostly taken a physics class before, 2) the AP students are on average taking higher math classes, 3) I only have 10 kids in the AP class, but 3o in the honors. Because of these facts, honors stopped at the beginning of free fall.

I did get through free fall in my Conceptual class, which is for students whose math skills are poor. We keep it below trig in that class. I took that class out to the football field today and re-enacted the experiment for which Galileo is so famous (and which we have no evidence he actually did); Dropping stuff from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We dropped a golf ball and a bowling ball from the top of the bleachers. They knew what was supposed to happen, probably from their middle school course, but it got us outside and helped establish after a week of class that physics might actually be a fun course. We'll see how long I can keep that up.