Why Physics is Unpopular

As someone who loves physics and pretty much everything about it, I always wondered how people could hold any sort of contempt against my favourite subject. I understood that a bad teacher could put a dampener on the subject but anything else? I didn’t get it.

After a bit of research and some long discussions with various people, I found out that it mostly circulates around these reasons:

A)      Too much emphasis on getting the right answer

B)      Not enough time to thoroughly go over the subject

C)      Physics (like maths) is an outlier subject

D)      A missing foundation

Let’s go over these, shall we.

The first point is unfortunately a staple of schools everywhere. The need to get a right answer is overwhelming. Either the student is scared their grades will go down and they won’t achieve their goals because of this or parents are tearing at their children so they get better grades, either out of concern or love of bragging rights. This puts immense pressure on students and causes a negative view of subject in which an A doesn’t come as easy.

For some students, there isn’t enough time to understand the concept. Physics is a wide subject. You can’t exactly cram it into a couple of hours a week and expect high results. The amount of topics in a year is disproportionally high as opposed to, let’s say, English. There isn’t as much time to go over the maths or practice calculations. Some topics are vaguely explained by a hurried teacher while others are held up until the next year where the new teacher is under the assumption that it’s already been covered.

Another reason Students don’t like physics is that it is a subject where you cannot make sense of it with memorisation. The majority of school subjects have a teaching style that is beneficial to those who can memorise easily. Concepts flow into your brain and through your hand onto the exam paper. With physics, that doesn’t happen. You need to understand what’s going on. You can’t teach it as a subject for memorisation.

The fourth problem lies in the system itself. Physics and maths are subjects that go hand in hand (for a while anyway). A part of early mathematics should be teaching logic. Basic maths should be a part of any physicists repertoire. Sadly, this isn’t necessarily a given. Over the course of the years and careful evaluation of how the subjects are taught, research finds that maths and physics are taught more and more like English or history. This, of course, works as well as you’d expect it to.

So how do we fix this? Well, for starters, we need to get comfortable with the subject being taught differently than the others and we need to get comfortable making mistakes. Physics is a thinkers subject. It is a logic subject. Memorisation only helps with the absolute basics of the topics. You can memorise a general concept, but not an equation. You can’t memorise understanding.

We need more time for physics and maths in general. You can brush a concept to get the gist of it, but forget understanding it like that. The subject almost requires a learning environment where students are able to experiment and explore. There needs to be a correlation to real life scenarios. This helps students visualise what is happening and causes the little grey cells in their head to start wondering. STEM subjects thrive on curiosity and creativity. These two phenomenons cause discussion which leads to discovery and learning.

We need to teach Physics, not as a school subject, but as a big question. We must challenge students to go out and find the answers using the tools we can give them.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10763-018-9900-4

https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5653990

phystec.physics.cornell.edu/content/why-teach-physics