![]() Part of this, undoubtedly, was due to the fact that other areas (history, languages, music and literature) were far more of a focus of my early upbringing: Helen Czerski’s afterword to Storm in a Teacup, where she recounts how both her family background and growing up in industrial Manchester helped shape and foster her interest in science and technology, spoke to me just because I can relate to precisely the opposite notwithstanding the fact that both my grandmother and her twin sister studied medicine (they were among the earliest women to enroll in that field in Germany) and several of my aunts - cousins of my mother - are doctors as well.īut I also would wish my high school teacher had taken a similar approach to his teaching as Czerski does in Storm in a Teacup, because the first of several things she achieves (and the importance of which my teacher missed entirely) is to make her readers understand why physics matters to each of us and what it has to do with our daily lives, above and beyond the puny truisms that we’ve all heard of. As a result, for the longest time and until I somewhat grudgingly decided to remedy that fact much later in life, my understanding of physics - other than optics - was essentially a “reflected” understanding, to the extent that the laws of physics were relevant to other subjects, such as biology and chemistry (e.g., in the composition and behaviour of cells and atoms). That dubious honour always went to physics alone. Even maths presented decidedly less of a challenge: I didn’t particularly care for it, but it was never a subject apt to seriously endanger my grade point average. However, with the exception of optics, I’ve always struggled more to get a grip on physical concepts than on biological or chemical ones. Now, far be it from me to blame my own deficiencies on the deficiencies of my high school education: Though I’ve always loved biology (and been fascinated by the scientific / theoretical aspects of medicine), it’s unlikely I would ever have chosen science as a career. (Which, back in the day, was virtually my only saving grace when it came to tests, though in the long run it of course didn’t help at all.) In short, he’d probably have made a stellar physics professor at university - as a school teacher, however, he was entirely miscast. It certainly also didn’t help that he was teaching in what was to him a foreign language - and that he had no clue how to police cheating: whatever method he came up with, we were always at least a step or two ahead of him. ![]() ![]() My high school physics teacher was a very nice gentleman who clearly loved his subject - but who equally clearly lived in a very different world from that of us rowdy teenagers, and to whom it never even seemed to occur that his way of thinking might just be a tad too alien and abstract for most of us (or if it did occur to him, he didn’t have the slightest clue how to bridge the gap). Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about your toaster (and your afternoon cup of tea) but so far never even thought to ask. ![]()
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