As we have to cut our courses to the essentials... what are the essentials?

I've been asked a number of times about what to do if you have to teach a portion of the year online.  What are the most essential elements of a conceptual physics course?

First and most important, please read this post about the purpose of teaching physics.

But even once you share my goals about purpose and experience and culture, the question remains - what topics are you retaining?  Which are you cutting?  What are you doing with your class when you're exclusively online?

In all seriousness - at levels below AP - I recommend that if you have to be online to start the year, you just play with your class.  Do Sporcle, Dungeons & Dragons, intellectual games like Charty Party or Codenames, Crayon Physics Deluxe... whatever a nerd like you (and me!) would do with your family or friends on a Saturday night.  These are the sorts of things that my college friends did on weekends; come to the AP Physics readers' lounge and you'll see these things, too.  That's not physics, you say.  It's not.  It's relationship building.  And when you get back to actual school, your students will be way on board with studying physics because you didn't pile on the work when they were stuck at home without same-age companions for the seventh month in a row.  And physics taught live in person can feel like a video game, anyway.

But what topics do you cut out to trim to the essentials?  What do you try to "teach remotely" if you have to?

On one hand, building skills in conceptual physics is topic-agnostic.  You can teach effectively, you can give students an excellent first-year experience, with any combination of topics.  I recommend picking topics that you have equipment available for.

Then, for this oddball year, I recommend starting with non-cumulative topics.  We've done this for years for our 9th grade class - at boarding school, a 14 year old is often so overwhelmed living life on their own in an intense new culture that they aren't paying so much attention to their studies.  We do serious physics in the fall trimester.  However, a student who falls behind or doesn't quickly adapt to high school academic life isn't lost.  Quite frequently, a student does poorly on our Thanksgiving exam, but comes back in December with new life - more confidence, more experience living in our community, more willingness to study.  And they just jump right in, because we're starting from scratch with motion.  (Had we started off with motion and force, they'd be totally left in the dust when we move on to momentum and energy!  But if you don't get circuits, you can still do fine in motion and force.  These topics don't really build off one another.)

Originally when we designed our course, conceptual physics looked like this:

1. optics
     a. reflection/refraction
     b. lenses
     c. mirrors
2. waves
     a. v=λf
     b. sound and light
     c. dopper/resonance/diffraction
3. circuits
     a. Ohm's Law
     b. resistors in series and parallel
     c. power in bulbs
4. motion
     a. position-time graphs
     b. velocity-time graphs and acceleration
     c. equations describing motion
5. force
     a. direction of force and motion
     b. Newton's second law
     c. Newton's third law
6. motion and force in two dimensions
     a. adding force vectors in two dimensions
     b. Newton's second law in two dimensions
     c. projectile motion
7. impulse/momentum
     a. conservation of momentum in collisions
     b. impulse-momentum theorem
8. energy
     a. forms of energy; the energy bar chart
     b. making predictions using energy bar charts
9. harmonic motion
     a. objects on springs
     b. pendulums

About four years ago, our school changed schedules; we lost a small percentage of our time with students.  So, we had to cut - we cut out mirrors, we cut out doppler/resonance/diffraction, we cut out harmonic motion.

It's not so possible to make careful plans this year.  The world was different a month ago, and certainly three months ago.  The world will be different again in October and January, in ways we can not predict. 

So what should you cut?  I certainly recommend starting with non-cumulative stuff this year, or planning the non-cumulative stuff for the most uncertain times.  If you must be entirely online and you must do some sort of real physics, do optics and waves (and circuits, if you have to!)  Then when you return, dive into motion using your carts and tracks and detectors.

My boarding school is planning a college-style schedule... that is, we're all coming back to campus, but we're leaving at Thanksgiving and most likely not returning until January.  So... I'm cutting the circuits unit, and moving the more difficult and more experimentally intense motion unit to October.  If we can come back in December, I'll cover circuits then; more likely, we can either try to study circuits with the excellent Phet simulation; or, I can cut it entirely and play games with my class online in December.  I'll see how things go.

Position statement - what is the purpose of teaching conceptual physics?

The purpose of a first-time physics class is NOT to cover content!  It's to build community through the shared challenge of understanding how the world works.

Many of your students will never see physics again.  For these folks, I don't care if five years down the line they remember how only the net force can be set equal to ma, or if they know the difference between acceleration and velocity.  (They might remember - I've heard course alumni misstate a physics concept, and their friends correct them.  But they might not, and it doesn't matter.) 

I care whether they had a good experience in the class, such that their impression of my class at a reunion will be similar to their impression of their JV baseball experience.  That they bonded with their classmates over a shared and worthy goal.  That they found support - both from me and from their classmates - when they struggled, and that they gave such support when their classmates needed it.  That they gained experience working through struggle without despair.  That they learned what academic success feels like, and how to celebrate success while still "acting like you've been there before," and how to celebrate their classmates' successes as well as their own.  These are the most important outcomes of physics class by far.  It's why we are in school to begin with.

In terms of physics itself, I care whether my students develop respect for science, for evidence-based reasoning, such that they know how to stand up to those who reject science in pursuit of a political agenda.  I care that they understand what constitutes experimental evidence, such that a pseudoscience peddler showing a graph with merely two ill-gotten data points is laughed out of the room.

Interestingly, I find that these science-specific goals follow on from the experiential goals.  In a class with a cutthroat every-student-for-themself culture, the one who stands up against intellectual dishonesty is ganged up on as a goody-two-shoes nerd.  In a class with a positive and supportive culture, they stand with each other.

Some of your students will take an advanced physics course, either in high school or college.  (You will have done more to inspire them to continue by building class culture than by covering any particular physics topic.)  These students will be well served by the skills you've taught them; more importantly, they'll know how to be the leaders in their next class, passing along that positive and supportive culture.

In my next post, I'll address an important question about content in conceptual physics, about how to adjust your course when you lose the first quarter of the school year to "remote learning" <derisive spit>.  And certainly if you come to the Conceptual Physics Summer Institute I'll model some ideas about teaching physics online (because the institute is being conducted online!).  Nevertheless, I can't emphasize enough - your students' experience in the course is so much more important than any content coverage or delivery.  If you do nothing but play pokemon with your conceptual class for nine weeks of remote learning <spit>, you will still be able to provide a rigorous, effective physics experience to your class when they return to school.  Even if you only cover 3/4 or 1/2 of the expected content.

No preludes... just dive in to physics. Like in Hamilton.

Take a cue from Hamilton in how you start your course.  I saw the show live back in February.  Now I've seen it again on video.  Of course, I'm a bit of a musical theater nerd - I went in having heard the soundtrack, excited for the experience.

Don't think about me in the audience.  Think about the person who's been dragged to see the show, perhaps by an over-enthusiastic friend, parent, spouse, or date.  This can't possibly live up to the hype.  Right?  Woah, two hours forty minutes?  OMG.  Let's get this thing started so we can get it over with.  Maybe I can make an excuse and slip out at halftime.

And then... do you know how the show starts?  Not with an overture.  Certainly not with (director) Tommy Kail coming out on stage to say "Okay! I know some of you don't want to be here, but we're going to have a fun time together! Turn to your neighbor and tell them what you love most about theater!  And now, let me tell you why *I* love our show and why you will too!"  Nope.  That's gonna make your date ever more angry about being dragooned to the show.

The start of the show is quite sudden.  A voice comes over the loudspeaker.  Paraphrasing: "I am your King, George the third. Please silence your cell phones.  Welcome to my show."  I mean, no more than 10 or 15 seconds of talking.

A man walks onto the stage.  Spotlight on him.  He starts rapping.  Here we go...

Before they know it, the skeptical friends are cheering for the Continental Army at the Battle of Yorktown, they're a bit choked up because John Laurens died, and they're racing to the bathroom in order to make it back before the second half kicks off.  There wasn't time for complaints or sarcastic comments.  The show is amazing - so the cast gets right down to business, capturing the audience before they have a chance to remind themselves that they weren't planning on enjoying the show.

What you do on the first day of physics class?  I dive in.  In AP, it's straight up equilibrium demos.  In conceptual physics, I'm doing reflection labs.  No preamble, nothing.  Physics is amazing.  So I get right down to business, capturing the audience before they have a chance to start that performative negativity that's so endemic in high schools.  Before they know it, my skeptical students are making predictions that they can verify by simple experiments, and having fun doing so.