A few semesters back, I was a teaching assistant (TA) for an introductory physics course at U of T. After the midterm, a disheartened student complained to me that the test was too hard, since “It was not the same as the previous year’s midterm.” I had to check myself from laughing — but they were being quite serious.
My next reaction was to worry. After all, if this was that student’s expectation, we as instructors must have seriously erred in our teaching. Should we not aim for a class in which every student leaves with a little spark of interest or satisfaction, rather than completing the course as a box-ticking exercise? After all, what is the point of what, or how, we teach?
I don’t want this to be another in the long line of ‘teachers need to learn the science of teaching before teaching science’ articles. However, as a physics student surrounded by other graduate students who also notice worrying trends in student interest at the first-year level, I argue for a renewed perspective on teaching and learning.
Specifically, we can greatly improve the introductory physics courses that cater to non-physics specialists. We must respect the students by giving them agency, allowing them to make decisions during lab investigations, and generating their own knowledge instead of being told which series of tasks to complete. We need to focus on rewarding challenges and creative thinking.
TAs have a key role
A physics course is not just about the material — part of the fun (or the pain) is in the personality you end up with as your TA. In fact, I’d wager that how well a physics student remembers a course is correlated with how much they liked their TA. The TA is the link between the student and the material, which should ideally function as a channel for enlightenment. The issue is when this channel is broken with no hope of repair.
Put simply, it’s easy to be a bad TA — just show up, hand out questions, and sit at the front of the class. However, TAs have a critical role to play beyond developing students’ technical abilities. Tutorials and practical sessions allow students to spend more time with the material at a slower pace, with the bonus of direct interactions with experts. As TAs, we should take these opportunities to act as ‘more knowledgeable others’ — mentors that push students to become more self-confident and skillful, instead of treating our duties as a chore.
Make the content relevant
My friend, Jack Gwozdecky — a PhD student in the Department of Chemical & d Physical Sciences — also believes that introductory courses for non-specialist students lack the rigour and energy given to physics-stream students. In a conversation where we reminisced about our undergraduate experiences at the University of Waterloo, Gwozdecky recalled the importance of a strong first impression by the instructor. His sentiments are backed up by evidence that shows decreased future enrolment in subjects taught by part-time staff.
The first courses Gwozdecky and I took at the University of Waterloo were taught by Richard Epp and the late Rohan Jayasundera — the most memorable personalities in the department. Epp’s catchphrase was to “think like a physicist” which became a borderline meme for us, and Jayasundera used to shout out “I love you!” when someone asked a question. It’s hard not to enjoy classes like that, no matter how little you care about projectile motion.
Gwozdecky also noted in our conversation that unlike the humanities, where content is related to our subjective experiences and interpretations, physics is often introduced as an objective set of facts to be memorized. He instead advocates for teaching styles that weave the storied history of physics into the curriculum, humanizing the subject. In this way, Gwozdecky explained to me that one learns that the physics tools we use are not makeshift — they’re artisan.
Contextualizing the technical details of physics as a corollary to the human relationships that helped develop them enables a greater sense of appreciation for what we are learning.
What we teach is just as important as how we teach
Pedagogy, perhaps by its most direct definition, focuses on the methods and mannerisms of teaching. While these frameworks are essential for transforming teaching from a purely instinctive practice into a systematic process, they often overlook the equally important need to adapt and evolve the content being taught.
From my observation, students who struggle with fundamentals at the outset of the course fail to catch up sufficiently and, by the end, they have not developed the intuition that forms the core of any physics course. Other students will only care about memorizing which equations to use — God forbid you don’t provide an equation sheet — with no interest in understanding the process of physical reasoning. Teaching physics from slideshows made in the 1970s only exacerbates this issue. These required courses breed a sense of low expectation from students and we waste 12 weeks of opportunity each semester.
We need to start by respecting students and their time, irrespective of their future goals. I advocate for reducing the content of introductory courses and shifting the focus toward physics as a way of thinking. Put students in positions where they must justify — in written sentences, not just equations — the physical laws being applied and create examples that include derivations based on intuition and dimensional analysis.
In fact, I think we can do away with introductory courses for physics specialists versus non-specialists. As one who has TA’d for both, the differences between them are stark. Specialist courses often have tutorials focused on conceptual understanding and learning how to make decisions when setting up a physics problem, whereas non-specialist courses for physics majors and minors are focused on plugging-and-chugging. I see the latter as utterly useless and might as well be algebra homework.
Physics is not algebra. Students are not computers.
Let’s hold ourselves to a high standard
As the colloquial ‘Harvard of the North,’ we need to hold students to a high standard of excellence. This requires reciprocity. Instructors and TAs need to be dedicated and willing to spend time on enhancing what and how we teach and students need to be seeking challenge and discomfort.
We should not be teaching for prescription or replication. Rather, we need to be teaching to develop enthused and creative thinkers who can forge ahead without handholding — and without last year’s midterm.
Yousuf Ramahi is a second-year PhD student studying computational biophysics. He is a Graduate Studies Columnist for The Varsity’s Opinion section.
