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I just finished a 2 year course on Physics from a high school that was algebra based. I'll attest that algebra based Physics is the biggest waste of time ever.
by vault_ 16y ago
I just finished a 2 year course on Physics from a high school that was algebra based. I'll attest that algebra based Physics is the biggest waste of time ever. The worst part, if you know some calculus, is that you can glimpse what is happening behind the scenes of the formulas they give you. All I really learned from the course was a shortcut for doing the homework problems: make your givens somehow come out to the units required by the solution; double or halve in special cases. I just hope that mindset won't get in the way when I take a real physics course.
- hga 16y agoIndeed; I now realize I was really lucky when I took my high school physics course in that the teacher didn't assign any homework, it was all lecture and an automatic A. So the next year when I did physics for real with the calculus I had nothing to unlearn. Although at the same time due to the senior class math teacher having refused to teach I had to learn the calculus at speed, but I managed and it probably works better when you have real physics problems you're solving at the same time. E.g. I learned why trig is really important.