Summer Placements and Teaching without Demos/Practicals

Charlie tells us about an unexpected lesson in his audio diary. Patrick talks a little about his placement at MIT Haystack telescope. Thomas worries about how to teach when there is no practical or demo to be done.

S02 E03 Timestamps

• Charlie’ the non-specialist’s audio diary @ 01:00
• Physics in the News, water vapour on exoplanet @ 05:04
• Colin Lonsdale of MIT Haystack @ 08:00
• Teaching without practicals and demos @ 19:48
• Fermi Questions @ 26:10
• Air Pressure tricks @ 27:06
• Ways To Teach… Ionising Radiation @ 28:10
• Return of the vacuum cannon #tptpir @ 29:24

Summary

Charlie’s audio diary kicks off the podcast, telling us how he has not taught forces at all yet as he had to finish off the induction topic. Thomas then gets excited about the water vapour spotted on a planet 110 light years away from Earth. Amazing precision! Patrick then plays us the interview with Colin Lonsdale from the MIT Haystack observatory. Patrick did a placement there over the summer. Thomas then talks about teaching without practicals and demos and gets some advice from Patrick before deciding it is too big a topic; it needs a whole podcast. At the end of the episode we talk about Fermi questions and estimating and introduce a new Ways to teach… episode.

Ways to teach… Ionising Radiation

Please share your ideas about teaching Ionising Radiation. Tweet us @physicstp with the hash tag #tptpir , use the contact form below, our Instagram account @physics_teaching_podcast or email us contact at thephysicsteacohingpodcast dot com! After tweeting about this we already have seen a brilliant video about dealing with radiation issues in Russia (Thank you David Cotton @Newmanphysics).

Join in!

Please share ideas or successes – or indeed questions by messaging us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/physicstp.bsky.social .  You can also message us via our website contact form on every page of the web site at  the.physicsteachingpodcast.com, or email using the address given in the podcast (if we remember). We are moving away from X but can be found there as @physicstp.

Music

• Season 7: Physics Is Our Business by Miracles of Modern Science.
• Seasons 5 and 6: Crescents by Ketsa.
• Seasons 3 and 4: Disco Sheik by Podington Bear.
• Seasons 1 and 2: One legged equilibrist polka by Circus Homunculus.
• Occasionally we also use Cantina Rag by Jackson F. Smith.

The music is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License