Perspective Makes All the Difference || Teaching Physics

High school students find certain subjects challenging, depending on their perspective on the subjects, and the majority of them seem to be the technical ones like mathematics and physics. If I were to be a teacher, I would choose physics because I know exactly what it's like to not seem to get it and just how to go about it.

In my first year as an engineering student at the university, I never had to study for the tests and examinations in order to do well in Physics. It sort of came naturally to me. However, the person I was at that time was the complete opposite of who I was a couple of years before. I was a total noob in that subject when I was in high school. Something happened between those two points in time.

You see, before I got into the university, I was a less-than-average student in high school. I was never the brightest student. It wasn't a thing to think about me whenever you needed help with a certain subject in school—any subject, in fact. But then I got to the verge of being thrown out of school for my steady decline in my academics. It was a threat to my ego, and that was the spark for something new.

I knew that if I didn't keep up with my academics, from the time I was in my penultimate year of high school, I was going to perform woefully in the examinations for admission into the university, and even if I did manage through, it would extend into my academic life, and that wouldn't go well for me. These thoughts pushed me into wanting to make a change, and I started to study for my life.

I began to read more than most of my colleagues. I found it difficult at first, but my determination to change my academic lifestyle gave me the drive to forge ahead. And with time, I read a whole lot more than most of my colleagues. The main subjects of concentration were physics and chemistry.

I studied so hard, practiced problems so often, asked a lot of questions that may have seemed silly to my colleagues—and got my answers, thanks to the understanding teachers—and hung out more with intelligent students that eventually became my friends. This turned me into a bookie, and in no time, I had mastered physics to the point where it was second nature to me—at least at my level.

Often times, students don't "like" physics because of their cognitive bias that it is difficult. They don't see the bigger picture, which is that physics is something they see every day. Let's take the following as examples:

• Gravity: In the back of our minds, we can predict how much of an impact a collision of an object with the floor will have based on the conditions surrounding that event and the damage it will cause. That is, if your mobile phone were to fall from a very small distance, we would naturally know that this would have less impact in comparison with a much higher distance.

• Electricity: We all know that the electric current that we actually use to charge our mobile phones, like with power banks, is much different from the ones we use for our blenders in that the latter (alternating current) can potentially electrocute one as opposed to the former (direct current).

• Optics: We use optics to correct our vision with eyeglasses and contact lenses, to take photographs with cameras, and to watch movies on a screen. It's part of our everyday use of technology, basically.

• Motion: Every time we move, there are certain laws guiding the way we perceive our environment and how we physically interact with it.

I can go on and on about how important physics is in our everyday lives and how it really isn't as difficult as many people perceive it to be, but we'll save that for if I do get to teach physics someday. Simply having an open mind and the willingness to learn physics is the basic requirement for understanding the theories behind our interactions with the universe.

Physics is fun for me, and because I know what it's like to find it challenging at first, it is something that I can efficiently teach high school students. I have spent reasonable time understanding it, so it shouldn't be a hassle relaying that knowledge in a simplified manner.