Blowing Students’ Minds

This is one of my favorite parts of teaching—that moment when you tell kids something, and they give you that look.

“Seriously? No way!”

I teach such a wide range of kids, those jaw-dropping moments can come in a variety of ways, especially during the years when I’ve taught physics. Here are a few examples.

• When it’s three o’clock Thursday afternoon for us, it’s eight o’clock Friday morning in Australia.
• How dirt-simple derivatives in calculus can be with shortcuts like the Power Rule, yet still give the same information as the long limit-definition way.
• What happens when you shoot a laser pointer through a piece of diffraction grating (or a prism, or a lens).
• What happens when you look through a piece of diffraction grating at a prism while outside in the sun. (This was accidental, and very cool. We had fun in our color and optics unit.)
• The whole idea of traveling close to the speed of light and all the crazy things that go along with it, like the Twin Paradox.
• The crazy things that just plain sound waves do to cornstarch and water.

2 Responses to “Blowing Students’ Minds”

1. Jemi Fraser says:

   April 9, 2012 at 11:24 pm

   I’ve never tried the speaker one, but it always looks so fun. 🙂

2. E.B. Black says:

   April 10, 2012 at 4:08 am

   I was best friends with a guy who lived in Australia. When we’d talk, I’d ask him how the future was going.