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The box above is "Welcome to Physics Class" (or if that was too hard to do, just "welcome") in each of the languages representing the backgrounds of students I've taught. In order from the top:
English
Vietnamese
Spanish
Russian
Korean
Farsi
German
Klingon
Thu'um
Portuguese
Urdu
Gujarati
Chinese (Mandarin)
Choctaw
Caddo
Potawatomi
Latin
French
Italian
Chickasaw
Tagalog
Sioux
Cheyenne-Arapaho
Comanche
Japanese
Kiowa
Shawnee
Swahili
Cherokee
All say "Welcome to Physics Class" except Choctaw, Caddo, Potawatomi, Chickasaw, Tagalog, and Cherokee. These say "welcome" or "hello." The Sioux says "happy to see you!" Cherokee text from www.cherokee.org
Since 2019 I've been a physics teacher at East Lyme High School in Connecticut.
 From 2008-2016, I was a physics teacher at Southmoore High in Moore, Oklahoma. |
 From 2016-2019, I was a physics teacher at Manchester High School in Connecticut. |
Students often are nervous about taking their first Physics class. The class has a repuation for having a lot of math in it, and there's no shortage of people out their willing to tell you "oh, I just never got it." It's rough being a physics teacher sometimes at a party when someone asks "what do you do?"- usually it means you're going to get an earful about their time in physics.
I want to be clear that my first goal in this class is to help you learn to love this topic as much as I do. The things you're going to learn about in here are at the heart of who we are as a society. Without physics, we're still sitting by candlelight waiting for the sun to begin its daily orbit of earth. The journey to the Moon and beyond began with Issac Newton saying that things and space and things on earth have the same rules. That we can make as much electrical power as we want began with Hans Christian Orsted noticing a compass needle move when he was playing with an early battery. That you're reading this on a computer is because a few physicists at Bell Labs in New Jersey figured out how to make a crystal of silicon act as an automatic switch. To paraphrase Newton we are standing on the shoulders of giants in our modern time, and this class will help you understand how and why.
The value of this class will not be in the facts you learn, though... it will be in the way you learn to think differently. There's a reason doctors, for example, are required to learn this material. It's not that a podiatrist spends her days calculating launch angles for civil war cannons... it's that the problems in this class require you to plan your solution in advance and in a really organized fashion. You'll learn how to think about your thinking, and how to realize when you've been doing something wrong. Those skills are why physics is so important.
Will that be challenging? Yes. But we'll learn it together, all of us, and we'll do everything we can to make it a successful and enjoyable year. I always want to help students, so contact me if you ever feel like you're worried about something. And please never be afraid to ask a question in class... if it's something you're concerned about, it's something we need to talk about, and your classmates will be grateful you brought it up.
Here's to a great year!
-Dowd
(c) 2008-2019 Timothy M Dowd. Last Modified @ 18:04 EDT on 2022-08-28
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