Ask around for the names and addresses of physics teachers in a similar
situation to yours, but who have been teaching for some time and have a
stable job. Contact them and ask for advice - they'll always be glad to help.
You are in a community college. If it is similar to the other community
colleges in Iowa (I don't know them all), check with other community
college teachers. At the Boone campus of Des Moines Area Community
College, Nancy Woods has been teaching algebra-based and calculus-based
physics for many years, and has a good reputation. Sometimes (for
scheduling reasons) some Iowa State University students take her class
since she is only a dozen miles away. I know she uses a lot of worksheets
for teaching.
Further away from you, but easy to reach by email, is Mick Arnett at
Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids. I'm sure he is the best
college physics teacher in the state - even including those at our biggest
universities - and he teaches a rigorous course but is well liked by
students and always gets high evaluations. He also uses a lot of
worksheets, and I'm sure he will share materials with you. Watching Mick
in class is interesting. He is very low-key, not a showman, and every
sentence seems to end with a question. His patter typically is something like:
"We usually start a mechanics problem like this with a free-body diagram,
so what's one of the forces we need to put on the diagram?"
"All right, gravitational is mg down [shown as a vector] - so what's
another force?"
"The electric force - all right, what direction would that be in?"
"Right - it's a positive charge and the field is directed upward, F = qE
[written as a vector on the board], so the force is also upward - what
other forces?"
"If that's all the forces, what do we do next?"
"All right, Newton's second law, which mathematically is what?"
etc.
If an answer is slow in coming, he waits, and waits, and maybe repeats the
question, or rephrases it. He's not the typical physics teacher who will
wait no more than 1.7 seconds. Occasionally he will call on a student by
name, but never in a way that embarrasses them. Or if someone comes up
with an incorrect answer, he might ask the class if everyone agrees, hoping
to get a different opinion. Mick is always friendly to students and gives
them all the impression that he cares for them and wants them to do well,
which is why he is well liked.
Hang in there, keep the material that worked well, redo the material that
didn't work. You're always learning about the students. I remember the
first time years ago that I passed out a short quiz involving kinetic
energy and discovered many students think it is a vector. No
multiple-choice quiz would show this unless you happened to have put down a
vector as a choice. Last week I got a surprise when most of my engineering
students had great trouble with this simple question I posed in class:
"Parallel-plate capacitors A and B are connected in parallel to the same
battery. The electric field in A has twice the magnitude of the electric
field in B, but the plates of B have twice the electric charge of the
plates on A. Compare the plate areas and separations of the two
capacitors." I know they have great difficulties with ratios, but I need
to be reminded of that occasionally. I think this question in a high
school science bowl competition would elicit a buzzer response in just a
few seconds, from a student who was good at ratios.
Laurent Hodges, Professor of Physics
12 Physics Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3160
lhodges@iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~lhodges