Summer Time

Well graduation has already happened and the 25-26 school year draws to a close. I'm going through the Sisyphean task of cleaning and organizing my room for the school year. That's the thing they don't tell you about teaching physics when you're in whatever teacher training program you're going through, the sheer volume of stuff that you accumulate while is unbelievable. Every physics teacher I know goes through the same process, you get a job, you inherit a room that someone else taught physics in for 20 years before you, they accumulated more random junk than you thought could possibly fit in one room, and you spend the next 10 years of your career slowly throwing out all their old random stuff and replacing it with all your new random stuff.

I'm at the point with my room now where I'm nearly done throwing out all the old random stuff, but I'm still a ways away from getting all of the new random stuff I feel like I need for all of my courses.

I'll try to document on this site all of the things I get, both high end and on a budget, that I think are useful for successfully teaching any level of physics. All of the random toys I've found, all of the home made lab setups I've engineered, and all of the gold standard lab equipment I've paid top dollar for that I consider worth it, I'll put it all here so any teacher wondering how to outfit their own lab will know what to get.

Inevitably I always get asked the same thing as summer approaches; "what're you up to this summer?" "Got any plans?" "are you working anywhere?" This year I'm excited to get to say I'll be working here. I'll have the freedom of time to continue to work on this site and make it something I'd be proud to use in my own classroom, hopefully by the time the 26-27 school year starts.

If you're a fellow physics teacher out there reading this, and you're looking for something useful to your praxis, all I can say is stay tuned! Once the school year started winding down and I had time to actually think about things other than my own classes my mind was ON FIRE with all the ideas I want to implement here.

It's the first of June, and I can genuinely say that I haven't felt this level of passion for my job since I started teaching 11 years ago. While I'm glad to have a break from classes, I have no interest in having a break from thinking about how to teach physics. With that passion comes a lot of excitement for this side project of mine, I've never been so excited to work on something before, now all that's left to do is to do it!

That's all for now! As always, take care of yourselves.

-Matt