The Physics Teaching Podcast

Tag: uncertainties

  • The Doctor Will Teach You Now

    The Doctor Will Teach You Now

    Friend of the podcast and 40 year old NQT @Jo_Moore_Sci joins us to talk about her winding path to Physics teaching.

    Jo is a career-changer from a medical background who kindly agreed to join us to chat about her experience of teaching physics. Jo is really enjoying teaching the subject despite it being deemed ‘out of specialism’ for her. Jo is an inspirational example for teachers who may be new to physics, and her message: enjoy it! Don’t worry about your mistakes, and take advantage of the support provided by the IOP, Ogden Trust, Physics Partners… oh, and the podcast, of course! There are some links below to helpful sites for non-specialists.

    If you stumble across this podcast and you are considering teaching as a career, we’ve included some useful links below.

    Links

    TalkPhysics – IOP forums with a vast range of discussion topics and helpful specialists on hand to answer questons

    Ogden Trust – Supporting physics teaching in schools via partnerships, resources and promoting teaching and learning

    Physics Partners – partnerships of schools in England aimed at supporting physics teaching

    Get Into Teaching – The government’s site promoting teaching with information about routes into the classroom

    The Brilliant Club – The “Researchers in Schools” programme offers a unique route into teaching for those with a PhD

    Now Teach – aims to help career changes into teaching.

    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

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

  • Uncertainties

    Uncertainties

    Dr Dave Farmer joins us to talk about uncertainties.

    The tweet that started it all

    Friend of the podcast Dave Farmer returns to talk about a subject to strike fear into any physics teacher’s heart: uncertainty! We peel away some layers of complexity to reveal… more layers of complexity! Having worked with a lot of exam boards’ A-level specs over the last few years, Dave recommends reading the mark schemes and looking for examples of what your particular exam board recommends. Whether we are talking scale resolution, combining uncertainties or ascertaining the gradient of a graph with error bars, we couldn’t agree on any of them. But don’t despair, there’s a lot of uncertainty about uncertainty, so just work out what your exam board require and after that, let your students develop their ideas.

    We also emphasise that all of these methods are estimations and approximations: rigorous statistical consideration of uncertainty is a scientific career in itself, so inevitably A-level is just going to scratch the surface.

    Finally we celebrate a physics teaching hero: take a bow Dr Peter Edmunds the Science Doctor who has shared an immense catalogue of resource for physics at all stages. Stuck for some resources? You’ll find something on Peter’s excellent site – link below. Why not fill your boots and then buy Pete a coffee?

    Links

    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

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