My question is: how can our science department, guidance department and
administration improve the amount of interest in physics? I don?t want to
create a dog-and-pony show to entice students to take physics; nor do I want
to create the Bill Nye effect of a surface understanding. I want to develop
true interest among the student body.
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This is my sixth year teaching at a rural school in PA. When I was hired
there was only one college prep physics class of 28 students. I also taught
math. In time the number of students increased. By my third year I had
added a second year physics course, and gave the option of students taking
the AP exam. Currently, I have 3 sections of college prep physics, 1
section of AP physics. Next year we will be offering an honors level of
physics I, and I expect to have a full teaching load of physics.
I am not sure that I did anything extra special to increase the number of
students taking physics. As a science department, together with the
guidance department, we started encouraging students to take more than one
science course each year. I guess this may not work with block scheduling.
Also, we did not restrict specific science courses to a certain grade
level, rather we gave our courses prerequisites. For example, my college
prep physics course is open to 10-12th grade students that have successfully
completed Algebra II. I'm not sure what the exact reason for the increase
in physics students, but I am not complaining.