Positive Physics

During my second year of teaching, I was watching my class struggle through their midterm exam. It was one of the lowest points of my teaching career, but it would turn out to be one of the most inspirational. DeMarcus, lacking a strong foundation in mathematics, had made an error manipulating an equation; Raven was stuck on the third step of a problem, the step which always seemed to give her trouble; and Josh was just staring at the wall, averting his eyes from the paper, completely intimidated by the words and numbers on the test. My students were frustrated because they desperately wanted to be successful and they could not succeed at solving the problems. And at that moment it hit me, the failure was really my own.

By relying so heavily on long example problems and algebraic formulas as is done in the traditional approach to teaching physics, I was making physics inaccessible to too many of my students who came to me grade levels behind in math and reading. Worst of all, even those students who scored well on the exam, had not understood the larger picture—namely, how the process of solving the problem was a demonstration of a conceptual principle of physics, and they had not experienced any of the wonder and joy of learning physics.

So I started over, because I was determined that any student who sat in my physics class could learn and love physics. Over the last decade, through many trials and with the help and patience of my amazing students and co-workers, I developed a curriculum, I call Positive Physics. After seeing how successful my students were, I decided that this needed to become a website, so students could interact with the curriculum and I could share it with others. At first, everyone I spoke to said that I could not make this happen without a large team and immense financial resources. However, after a pick-up basketball game, I happened to share my story with my friend and incredibly talented developer, Anthony Fizer, and he said he believed we could make this happen ourselves. Less than three months later, my students were testing the first version of positivephysics.org.