Physics, the "I don't understand what's going on thread!" (3 Viewers)

[~shinigami~]

Going into Yr11, my biggest fear was doing Chemistry and Physics because they are notoriously difficult. To my suprise, I loved Chemistry but Physics confuses the <bleep> out of me.

I'm new to my school so I'm not sure if it's true but everyone tells me that my Physics teacher cannot teach. Well he's given us 3 textbooks and we haven't even touched any of them. Each lesson consists of him doing some sort of graph on his laptop or giving us a task that we need to finish before class ends (e.g. graphing, experiment etc).

I'm so confused about Physics but the bizzare thing is that I'm not even sure what I don't know in Physics because I don't know what we're learning.

I had to read the textbook myself when I got home to understand things such as superposition which is easy now but our teach never showed us properly and just gave us homework about superposition.

Basically I'm not happy about my teacher.

Anyone having trouble with Physics? What are your solutions to this problem?

But lets not make this into a negative thread about Physics, if possible, we can just discuss anything about Physics in this thread.

 

[Wooz]

Same i just changed to a selective school, i hate my physics teacher, so does everyone else (there going to do something to his car on muckupday).

He cant teach for sh*t in his yr 11 class the lowest mark was 43% and the higest was 75% and in his yr 12 class 1 person got band 6 in the other physics teachers yr 11 class had 73% as there lowest yearly mark and in his yr 12 class 15 people got band 6.

Where going to start a petition against our physics teacher. Also most of the people in my class get tutored and do self study.

 

[sunjet]

physics is a subject where you have to sit down and read the textbook.

 

[~shinigami~]

Same i just changed to a selective school

Same here.

i hate my physics teacher, so does everyone else (there going to do something to his car on muckupday).

Hahaha, nice! Actually depends on what car he has, if it's a good one...poor car.

P.S I love cars.

He cant teach for sh*t in his yr 11 class the lowest mark was 43% and the higest was 75% and in his yr 12 class 1 person got band 6 in the other physics teachers yr 11 class had 73% as there lowest yearly mark and in his yr 12 class 15 people got band 6.

I guess there's a universal bad physics teacher thing going on.

Also most of the people in my class get tutored and do self study.

I'm doing a bit of self-study, I don't know if it would help as much as having a decent teacher.

physics is a subject where you have to sit down and read the textbook.

The problem is the teacher has not used any of our three textbooks yet. Though I do try to read it in my own time, it's a bit hard to understand some concepts.

The teacher usually likes to use his laptop to teach us..

 

[Wooz]

My teacher uses his laptop for everything even for marking the roll, we got one textbook its 712 pages but some of its pretty hard to understand. The textbooks are given out because of boardofstudies rules. The teacher teaches everything but you must also refer to the text.

 

[chocolate_lover]

I've been at the same school since yr 7, and i do understand (and like) what im learning. I have a really good teacher, who explains the work by talking for the whole period (75 minutes).

 

[Pubert]

Physics is my most enjoyable subject. we started with motion rather than waves like alot of the other schools which really pissed me off because i did the waves topic in the holidays.
My physics teacher is cool and the class is awsome, i feel sorry for you if your teacher makes you dread physics. The textbook has everything, you don't really need a teacher just read the textbook and answer the questions, if you want you can write notes to be more thorough.


What i hate is english advanced.

 

[Ankita]

I've been at the same school since yr 7, and i do understand (and like) what im learning. I have a really good teacher, who explains the work by talking for the whole period (75 minutes).

Wow! Exactly same!..Our periods go for 1hr and 15 min 2...ddnt think there was any other school that had periods as long as ours!
my physics teacher is pretty good... has a pretty good sense of humour too!
although im still a bit dodgy with motion...like calculations involving v(1), v(2) etc...

 

[Bookie]

Year 11 physics I found was just a whole heap of disguised maths.

Just know the right formula, basically, and every answer will come to you.

I never got a physics question right the first tme round (even now). You always seem to forget one value, more often than not the acceleration of an object due to gravity. But the second time, the question usually makes sense, and you tend to glide through the following few until you get a question which introduces a new parameter. Meh, don't worry, it's not too bad. Probably should do some extra textbook exercises if you're feeling a bit weak, nd I probably should too, but I'm not getting round to it.

Have fun

 

[conman]

Same situation here, I hate this teacher as well. She just gave a difficult question without knowing the answer for it. She said just leave it and never touched her hand on it again.

 

[speedie]

Wow! Exactly same!..Our periods go for 1hr and 15 min 2...ddnt think there was any other school that had periods as long as ours!
my physics teacher is pretty good... has a pretty good sense of humour too!
although im still a bit dodgy with motion...like calculations involving v(1), v(2) etc...

Our periods go for 1 h and 20 mins ... actually thats probably not a good thing lol


but anyway, im accelerated in physics so i did the prelim course last year. I went reasonably well and got 2nd in the school. I had an ok teacher, but the trick to doing well in prelim physics is to organise all ur notes. I mainly talked in class so i really didnt pay attention to most of the things my teacher said. However, i organised the notes he gave us, and the notes we wrote down in class into the seperate topics we were learning. I didnt actually go through them so i was kinda empty when it came to following the stuff we were doing in class. But heres the trick- in year 11, nothing counts except for the assessment tasks, so before the assessments, i always crammed. Dont be surprised, cramming isnt good in year 12, but it works in the prelim course. I used to cram about 2 days before or the night b4 the exam for like 4-5 hours till i understood everything inside out. Thats the thing with the prelim physics course- the concepts arent hard at all to grasp, and if u cant understand it, just remember the definition- cause thats all they can ask in the exam anyway. I suggest you start going through the stuff about a week before any exams cause cramming is really tiring if u do it the night before. The advantage to cramming and not learning as u go is that like a week before the test you will have already finished the topic, and have gotten all the notes for it, so u can understand the topic easier if u learn it in one go. (sorry if that didnt make sense lol, im typing too much).

But ANYWAY- what im saying is u dont really need that good a teacher (for prelim ONLY) to get good marks in the prelim course. However, when u get to year 12, the concepts are SOOO much harder and u'll find it hard to keep up and IMPOSSIBLE to cram.

Sorry for the long post- well done if u read it all lol

 

[Wooz]

Wow! Exactly same!..Our periods go for 1hr and 15 min 2...ddnt think there was any other school that had periods as long as ours!
my physics teacher is pretty good... has a pretty good sense of humour too!
although im still a bit dodgy with motion...like calculations involving v(1), v(2) etc...

We also have 1hr 15min periods at my school, most selective schools have 75-80min period lessons.

 

[dzzlng_07]

hmm... OUR physics teacher can't get any worse.. he's not even following the syllabus... he gave us a "homemade" booklet about slinkies, ripples, slinkies, ripples..! we have to do useless experiments every single day. we stared at slinkies for one whole month..! and now we're FINALLY onto ripples...

i think what you should try to do is, buy a variety of textbooks and self study... you have to depend on yourself rather than the teacher :burn:

 

[Bookie]

Wow I notice Bookie actually made a helpful post.

I had the urge to do so. It was a reward for shinigamis good grammar and correct use of the english language in her initial post. It was well worded and required some response which I beleived I was able to fulfil.

Remember kiddies, Bookie will help you if your posts are coherent.

 

[Jono_2007]

He cant teach for sh*t in his yr 11 class the lowest mark was 43% and the higest was 75% and in his yr 12 class 1 person got band 6 in the other physics teachers yr 11 class had 73% as there lowest yearly mark and in his yr 12 class 15 people got band 6.
Where going to start a petition against our physics teacher. Also most of the people in my class get tutored and do self study.

But your teacher could be a really hard marker in which case the other teacher might look good because he marks easy compared to your teacher. Like my teacher who is great. one thing i would like to point out is that physics is a very difficult subject and is not something you can just learn, thus most people do shit.

 

[XcarvengerX]

Wow, so many physics teachers using laptop nowadays. What happened? Has physics become a more technological advance subject?

So the stereotype of physics teachers is lazy and using laptop to do his work. Mine too.

 

[SoulSearcher]

It's not that I don't understand the work that is given to me in Physics, it's just that I haven't been to many classes lately

 

[chocolate_lover]

I forgot to mention, my physics teacher sometimes uses a laptop too.

 

[ehcoroche]

if you get it....goood

if you kinda get it...read extra stuff...textbooks, online stuff whatever

if you really dont get it...ask you teacher, or another teacher from the staff

thats my ideas anyway, i got a pretty good teacher, he e-mails alot of stuff and will answer most questions that you ask either via e-mail, the next day, or send you a weblink that explains it, i got pretty lucky though

 

[Captain Gh3y]

If you don't get it and you're in year 11: Don't worry, because it counts for nothing. On the other hand, if you wanna do physics at uni, most of the useful stuff is funnily enough in the year 11 course, like vectors and such.

If you don't get it and you're in year 12: Rote learn the formulas (ie. what quantity is what letter, since u get the formulae anyway) and the theory, there'll be less than 5% of the HSC exam that requires non-direct application of the formulae anyway.