I became a school physics teacher by a combination of practical necessity and default. In my first two years teaching in a girls’ school, I discovered that even students who chose physics found it incomprehensible, and colleagues with a background in other sciences hated teaching it for the same reason.
My efforts to understand what made physics so alienating led me to rethink my own experiences as a physics student. At the time, I had blamed myself for not being a brilliant student; I hadn’t noticed that the physics I was being taught was completely disconnected from my lived experience of the physical world around me.
Making a conscious decision to change the way I was teaching, I started to listen more carefully to students’ questions, especially the ones that came from ‘left field’ and I tried to set up experiences that teased the questions out. I looked for ways to bring students’ experiences in the real world into the classroom, rather than focusing on the abstract concepts assuming they would make the connection themselves. As a result, I grew to love teaching, not just physics, but science in general. And I discovered my own fascination with science.
I have wanted to bring that fascination, that love of teaching and the approach that I learned the hard way, to U3A. I am sure there are many at U3A who gave up science at school at year 9, or as soon as they could, because it was boring and made no sense. I want to tell those people some of the fascinating stories that science makes possible. I want to encourage them to ask the ‘dumb’ questions that otherwise stand between them and their fascination with science.
This is the class I am offering in 2022 and it’s not too late to sign up:
Science stories that atomic variants tell
Carbon dating, invented in 1949, is possible because there is a particular variant of the carbon atom that is radioactive and continuously created in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Since the 1970s the development of ever more sensitive equipment has allowed such variant atoms to tell us unimagined stories, in areas from paleoclimatology to scientific forensics.
Modern medicine capitalises on the potential for radioactive, artificially produced, variants to reveal the inside workings of the human body through PET imaging. Such artificially produced variants are also used in food preservation and a variety of industrial processes. In this class we will explore the stories that variant atoms can tell, using the periodic table of the elements as our map.
Classroom rule #1: there is no such thing as a ‘dumb’ question!
Christina Hart
Class Leader, Carbon Dating and other Atomic Stories