The first thing is basic organisation of the problem and of its solution. The board is a mess, it’s hard to track which line leads to which, and yet this is essential to follow the reasoning. You can train that into your students with simpler problems, but requesting them to go thoroughly with them, in an ordered way; it’s also a great way to introduce new concepts so you don’t lose time.
This is important because, a lot of the times, students have a good grasp of the underlying concepts but struggle to chain them into a logical reasoning (it’s fine if it’s idiosyncratic, as long as it is there). And 5min later they don’t follow what they just did.
A lot of the students will suck major balls on the maths necessary to ground the physical concepts. That will take a huge time, so work in conjunction with the maths teacher to drill them in that. I remember Chemistry uni students not being able to calculate pKa because of fucking Baskhara, of all things.
Notation matters, you want to avoid ambiguity like a plague. A t is not a +, and the fraction in the second-to-bottom line is ambiguous (is it supposed to represent [80/(2t+1)] / 2, or 80 / [(2t+1)/2]?
Include the units into the maths, and encourage your students to do the same. Sometimes which formula you need to use becomes obvious from that alone; e.g. if you want distance and you got v=80, t=4, you’ll need to remember that s=vt; but if you were to list v=80m/s, t=4s instead, by the simple fact that distance is measured in metres you already know “well, I can cancel 1/s with s, so maybe I just need to multiply v by t, no?”
The first thing is basic organisation of the problem and of its solution. The board is a mess, it’s hard to track which line leads to which, and yet this is essential to follow the reasoning. You can train that into your students with simpler problems, but requesting them to go thoroughly with them, in an ordered way; it’s also a great way to introduce new concepts so you don’t lose time.
This is important because, a lot of the times, students have a good grasp of the underlying concepts but struggle to chain them into a logical reasoning (it’s fine if it’s idiosyncratic, as long as it is there). And 5min later they don’t follow what they just did.
A lot of the students will suck major balls on the maths necessary to ground the physical concepts. That will take a huge time, so work in conjunction with the maths teacher to drill them in that. I remember Chemistry uni students not being able to calculate pKa because of fucking Baskhara, of all things.
Notation matters, you want to avoid ambiguity like a plague. A
tis not a+, and the fraction in the second-to-bottom line is ambiguous (is it supposed to represent[80/(2t+1)] / 2, or80 / [(2t+1)/2]?Include the units into the maths, and encourage your students to do the same. Sometimes which formula you need to use becomes obvious from that alone; e.g. if you want distance and you got
v=80, t=4, you’ll need to remember thats=vt; but if you were to listv=80m/s, t=4sinstead, by the simple fact that distance is measured in metres you already know “well, I can cancel1/swiths, so maybe I just need to multiplyvbyt, no?”