James Ball, University of Guelph Sessional Lecturer
jball10@uoguelph.ca



In the winter of 1977 at the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) conference in Chicago, Ernie McFarland (then a faculty member at the University of Guelph) had a chance meeting with Scarborough high school teacher George Kelly. Both felt that it shouldn’t be necessary for Ontario’s physics teachers to travel to the United States to become better teachers. As a result of Ernie and George’s efforts, the OAPT (then known as AAPT-Ontario) became an official section of the AAPT in 1979 with Ernie as it’s first president. If you are interested in the history of the OAPT you can find an article, not surprisingly written by Ernie, here.
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Tags: History, Pedagogy

Dr. Carolyn Sealfon, Minerva University
csealfon@metalearning.ca

Wellness and mindfulness act as buzzwords these days, often seen as separate from physics. Yet we know they are important, and everything is related to physics! In this article, we will consider a few simple classroom activities that can both help students internalize the basic physics of forces and motion and also help facilitate well-being in our classes.

As Brookes, Etkina, and Planinšič argue, it is helpful to clarify our intentions as physics instructors and to align our instruction with our intentions. One valuable intentionality they propose is, “The way in which students learn physics should enhance their well being.” This intentionality underlies the renowned Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach to teaching high-school and first-year university physics (Brookes et al., 2020).

As physics instructors, one way we can integrate well-being and physics is through inviting students to feel the physics that they are learning in their bodies. When we are asked, “What do you teach?” we usually respond, “physics,” when really the answer is “human beings”. Very often, especially in physics, we and our students can get “stuck in our heads” and almost forget we are whole human beings.


Image from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com, used with permission. Read More...

Tags: Forces, Motion, Pedagogy

Eric Haller, Peel District School Board, Editor of the OAPT Newsletter
eric.haller@peelsb.com

We are once again looking for submissions to the OAPT Newsletter. Our newsletter is made possible by volunteers who contribute their thoughts and ideas for others to use in their classrooms. Many of our writers are Ontario high school teachers, however some of our writers teach in university, work abroad, work in science outreach, have retired, or have even left the teaching profession for some other career that involves physics. We have numerous writers who pen something for us regularly, but we are always on the lookout for new writers as well!

If you’re interested in writing for us but aren’t sure what you could write about, consider some of these topical themes in physics education:

• How are you taking advantage of AI in your physics classroom?
• How are you combatting the misuse of AI in your physics classroom?
• What fun things have you been doing with the destreamed grade 9 science course?
• How have you been incorporating climate change into your physics courses?
  

In addition to those current topics, we are always looking for articles involving these timeless topics:

• Physics education research
• An interesting lesson, demo, activity, or project you did with your students
• How you teach physics differently than other teachers
• How you assess students differently than other teachers
• Some resource, equipment, software, website, film, or book that you found useful for teaching physics
• Social justice issues that pertain to physics (correcting the gender imbalance, disrupting systemic racism, BIPOC scientists and where they fit into the curriculum, and so on)
• Explanations of big, new physics announcements, and how to make it accessible for students
• A lesson you did which incorporated interesting historical events and perspectives
• Professional development opportunities for physics teachers
• Something that another physics teacher did or wrote about that inspired you
• Preparing students for careers in physics
• An interesting field trip or virtual field trip you took your physics class on
• Something you presented at a recent OAPT conference that you wanted to share with a wider audience

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Chris Meyer, Past President, OAPT
c.meyer@bell.net

We want our students to become confident, fluent users of physics. We want them to develop good, reliable habits that will carry them through our physics classes and beyond. But very often, students become stuck on the habit hump! What is this mysterious hump? It is an analogy I use for our experience of the learning process and how we react and respond to it. If students better understand the learning process, my hope is they will make better decisions be more likely to stick to their learning. So, what is the habit hump and how do we get over it? Read More...

Tags: Optics, Pedagogy

Rachel Richardson, Education & Outreach Coordinator
outreach@snolab.ca

Everybody loves a mystery, and dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in our universe today. SNOLAB is Canada’s deep underground science laboratory that hosts large, international experiments; some of these experiments are designed to help unravel the mystery of dark matter. To celebrate Dark Matter Day, a public outreach initiative celebrated during Halloween, SNOLAB is hosting a creative poster design contest. Students and members of the community are invited to design original, two-dimensional visual artworks, in any medium, exploring the theme of dark matter.

Participants can be as creative as they like, letting their design shine as bright as the stars! Imagine an individual dark matter particle, or how it holds the universe together! They could draw an existing detector, dream up their own cosmic blueprint for an experiment, or travel deep into space following their imaginations into the oldest parts of the universe. Read More...

Tags: Contest, Modern Physics