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The Resources Around You
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by Greg Jacobs
Woodberry Forest School
Woodberry, Virginia
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More Teaching Strategies...
Save Yourself Time When Possible
The "less is more" approach should apply to the instructor as well as the students. If you can cut down the total amount of work you have to do, then you can spend what time you have in more relaxed, creative preparation.
While it is important to grade homework problems thoroughly and frequently, this doesn't mean that every problem must be graded. As long as students know that a problem is likely to be graded, they will put forth reasonable effort. I try to grade about half of the problems turned in. As the year goes on, you can grade even less.
Use veterans of your class as resources. I have the luxury of teaching Physics C as a second-year course. Starting in December, each student is assigned to grade a set of Physics B problems about once a week. I've been chagrined to find Physics C students to be more careful and thorough graders than I am much of the time. The side benefit of this assignment is that the second-year students get a chance to review material that is not on the Physics C exam, but is still important to know for national tests such as the AAPT Physics Bowl, the United States Physics Team, or the SAT II.
If you can get a veteran of Physics B assigned to you as a teaching aide, he or she can set up demonstrations, clean the laboratory, keep a bulletin board or notebook current with problem solutions, etc.
And Finally, Don't Expect Instant Success
Your school and your program are unique. It will take at least a year, if not several, for you and your students to become comfortable with this more intense but less time-consuming approach to AP Physics. Try some of these ideas, then ask yourself and your students what worked and what didn't. Consider every year not only what you'd like to add to your course, but what you could possibly subtract. Tell your outgoing students about your "less is more" approach -- they will appreciate how it worked for them, and they will spread the word to next year's participants. Their evangelism will make your job of indoctrinating the class to the course structure substantially easier as the years go on.
And finally, share your thoughts with other physics teachers. It's amazing how many ideas come out of good shop talk.
5 See "Giving a Quiz Every Lecture" by Robert Ehrlich, in The Physics Teacher, September 1995.
6 I don't start student grading at the beginning of the year; novice physics students often try to quibble about scores in the first few weeks, and sometimes the only answer to an argument is, "Because I said so." This sort of situation would be awkward if the assignment were graded by a fellow student. However, a few months into the course, I don't hear such arguments.
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