I had one student come to my office hours this week but also wanted to talk about stuff I've noticed in lecture as well.
It seems like some students are having trouble with two main things.
The first is letting go of their intuitions about physics and taking what is taught to them at face value. For example, when we did problems about throwing a ball up in the air on Monday, many believed that the ball will travel faster on its journey up but slower when traveling down. I think we should stress that they forget their inhibitions and approach what they're learning now as if they're seeing it for the first time.
The second thing I've noticed is that they will sort of give up if they cannot find the answer based on available formulas alone. I had to remind a student a bunch of times to not forget to find triangles in their problems and use the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry to solve them. This is something we should remind students about as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment