The Spherical Cow

This year my family has moved to the American School of Barcelona. My daughter goes to the preschool, my wife is the elementary art teacher and I have been hired to teach grade 10 physics and math.

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I'm a musician: I've played lots of different instruments, but I'm most at home on guitar. Over the years I've explored a lot of different styles like classical, brazilian  jazz, rock, and bluegrass to name a couple. Recently, I have dedicated my practice time to studying gayageum (traditional Korean harp). When I was younger, I dedicated several years of my musical life to learning North Indian Classical music on sitar. I also love to read. Fiction, non-fiction--it really doesn't matter as long as it's interesting and I learn something. Whenever there's a long break from school, I travel with my family. There's nothing like putting yourself in a new, uncomfortable place to make you question your own assumptions about life.

 

I find immense value in discussion. Learning is a social endeavor, at least for most of us (we are social creatures after all). I know I never would have made it through college if it wasn't for a solid group of friends that I studied with. It is in conversation where reasoning and learning really happen. Alone, we operate almost solely on our intuitive assumptions. It's only when we must justify our ideas to others that we really begin to reason through them at all.  This is why I make it a point to seek deep, challenging conversations with others.

 

In my time teaching AP Physics, I have shifted away from emphasizing content and computation in favor of more transferrable skills. This hasn't been hard because the AP Physics 1/2 curriculum clearly strives to incorporate science practices and general "thinking-like-a-physicist" skills more explicitly than AP Physics B and AP Physics C. Many physics teachers are on board with this philosophy, yet struggle to successfully implement it in their classrooms. My hope is that through this blog I can help other science teachers in developing their own courses to better incorporate these valuable life skills.

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