So, I have this AP physics I teacher. He teaches regular physics and PLTW engineering classes along with AP physics I and II.
The thing is though, he absolutely sucks at his job.
Now I could very easily be the kind of person that just complains because he gives us too much work or something like that but no. Not even. He barely gives us work, and he barely even bothers to check it. He tries to hard to be the cool funny hip teacher but it doesn’t work. In fact it gets in the way of actually teaching. Because we’re AP students he expects we know everything before hand, and expects us to know how to solve problems or understand certain topics with an incredibly brief explanation. He teaches by only giving us the definitions of key terms and throws some equations. He gives us “labs” with no proper explanation and we barely do anything in his class. Most of his classes consist of him sitting behind his desk while he gives us “practice problems” that he doesn’t even grade or check or even try to explain. He only explains the numbers to plug in but not WHY you plug in those numbers.
Students from his engineering classes don’t even know what’s going on. None of the students in this class know what’s going on and they hate physics because of him.
But I want to love physics! I have to, especially if I want to go into engineering. I’m pretty lucky not to have him as my intro to engineering class because my current teacher for that course is really good at explaining.
Not to mention when I ask for help he only explains briefly what to do and not WHY…
And whenever he teaches he puts in waaaay to many pauses and it looks like he makes his powerpoints 5 minutes before the class while skimming our 2004 giancoli physics textbook.
No student in his class understands anything physics, and to give you a comparison, regular physics kids have a lot more understanding of the subject and I actually have to ask help from them sometimes, and the kids in the AP classes have to depend on each other to help them out because they can’t even ask the teacher for a coherent explanation.
So I’m posting this looking for some tips on self-teaching myself, because I have problems trying to do these practice problems alone. It also looks like I’ll have to teach myself before the AP physics I test comes along because this nut isn’t going to teach me squat… I already ordered a Princeton Review book and even my friend is starting to self teach himself. Please help!
I’m teaching AP Chem to myself this year. I read through my textbook, go through the examples, watch YouTube videos on what I don’t understand, then go through Barron’s review questions.