Resources for Physics Teaching

Posted by Chad Orzel on August 11, 2011
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I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn’t helping. By being very helpful– he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too.

For the specific Matter and Interactions curriculum that we’re using, it’s probably also worth noting that they have a complete set of video lectures linked from their resources page. Unfortunately, these are complete with the “going over the syllabus” stuff in the early lectures, so the early going is a little rough…

And now, paper writing, damn it.

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Comments

  1. #1 Joss Ives
    August 11, 2011

    Hi Chad,

    I’m always happy to contribute to a little grey matter warmth. Thanks for sending your readers my way and I hope you are able to make some use of my post.

    - Joss

  2. #2 CCPhysicist
    August 11, 2011

    Nice resource, Joss!

    Chad, thanks for the tip about “going over the syllabus”. I found that very interesting to watch. She got past it in LESS than 10 minutes, mostly devoted to showing how to find the syllabus and other things on line. Having homework questions about the syllabus is much better than “going over” it. I particularly liked that she showed how to find the course materials even if you can barely remember you are a student at the college.

    I recommend watching the “syllabus” part and timing your first day of class. I take longer, but then I actually do one of the homework problems from the first assignment.

    The only thing I didn’t like is the “need to pass” rather than “need to know” objective — looking ahead to the day after the final exam is over with. Well, that and not writing the three principles on the board. I’m going to steal that 30 second intro, because it explains why my future engineers need to KNOW those fundamental principles: They apply to buildings and machines as much as they do to “physics problems”.