#i'm often tempted to become a physics teacher out of sheer spite | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

screambirdscreaming · 6 years ago

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me: I should make a little zine explaining tides and how they relate to moon phases!

*5 hours of research later*

me, ranting to my mom: -- and physicists never actually tell you when they’re giving you the simplified version, they just pretend it’s the real version, but the “bump of water” isn’t actually water, it’s a bump of the potential energy state of water, which answers some questions but raises others! And half the sources are just people arguing about which explanation of the antipodal tide is the right one when they’re actually THE SAME EXPLANATION from different frames of reference! And none of them mention if it’s equal in magnitude to the sublunar tide which is really all I want to know! And also --

#so it turns out tides are complicated bullshit #and the tidy little explanation I was given in grade school falls apart as soon as you learn basically any physics #and can't be put back together again until you learn WAY MORE physics #which is stupidly common in physics pedagogy - teaching simplified models that fall apart if you ask any questions whatsoever #which teaches people NOT to use logical reasoning or push for deeper understanding #and also leaves people really confused and questioning their own knowledge #when they learn a little more and it's incompatible with what you taught them was true (but was so simplified it was basically fake)#SO if I do make a zine or a lesson plan or a tumblr post about tides I don't want to do that bullshit #but I'm genuinely not sure how to give the real explanation without relying on reference frames and potential energy to explain it #which is frustrating because I like to explain things to a level that makes intuitive sense and is accessible to people #without any more science background than about what is taught in high school #and I can usually patch up gaps in people's high school science knowledge fairly readily #but potential energy and reference frames are both finicky bullshit concepts that I don't know how to teach intuitively #the typical college-intro-physics method is to just say ''here's a bunch of finicky bullshit; go with it or drop out of physics''#but that's so stupid and elitist and excludes people from actually learning and understanding #and a bunch of people go all the way through courses like that without ever getting it so that's not the approach I want to take at all #I HAVE SO MANY OPINIONS ABOUT PHYSICS PEDAGOGY #i'm often tempted to become a physics teacher out of sheer spite #but I actually kinda hate physics #so that's probably a bad plan

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