Today I had my first experiences as a teaching assistant for Preethi’s 10th grade physics classes. Both classes, 10C and 10A, had somewhat slow starts as both Zoom and the simulations we were using had some technical issues for some students, however things were sorted out quickly. Both sections spent the majority of class time in small groups working on activities, with 10C working on the Collisions PhET simulation, and 10A working on a momentum card sort in Google Drawings.

In both scenarios, I started out feeling fairly nervous/anxious, since as a 12th grader in a 10th grade class I felt that I didn’t belong, and that I would mess up the experience for everyone else there. However, I quickly learned both times that I wasn’t a nuisance, and was able to answer questions the 10th graders whose groups I joined.

One important thing I noticed is that answering the more physics-related questions, as opposed to questions about technical issues, I gained a better understanding of what I was helping them with. Since I have gone through the course already and I know the material, I both know the material better than the students, and know the material that comes later, which means I have tools at my disposal for problem solving and explaining that they don’t. This forced me to look at the material through a different lens to explain it to them, and gave me a more fundamental understanding. For example, one student asked why, in the PhET simulation, the green ball with a larger mass but slower velocity had more momentum than the smaller but faster red ball. In order to answer this question, I had to think back to when I learned momentum for the first time, with bar charts based on magnitude of mass and velocity. Thinking about it like this made me think about the basic relationship between mass and velocity, and that momentum is simply a combination of these two factors. The later material in the course got more complicated and the basic relationships and principals kind of got forgotten, at least for me, but by re-examining them to explain the question, I was able to learn something myself.