Physics

So, I've said it before, but at some point in my life, I want to be a physics teacher.

Physics is probably the branch of science (or probably of any subject) that I can explain best to people. And I love explaining things anyway, so it seems like a good combination, to do something that I love and that I'm also very good at.

Today I was brooding over what my class would actually be like, but the most prominent part of the class that I'd want to have is "play time." This would be a semester long project (for elementary to graduate students) to spend 15 minutes of every class with a partner, just playing with stuff and trying to get weird/funny/entertaining stuff to happen using physics. They could design a game, a gadget, a weird cannon or something, but it would have to be inherently silly in process and execution.

Physics for me is very visual and experiential. I can play things out in my mind and twist them around to make sense of them from most angles, and I think that's largely because so much of my (and other's) childhoods involve using physics to do some weird stuff.

For instance, my friend had a treehouse on a dusty dirt hill growing up. The dirt, when thrown, would make huge dust clouds (much to the annoyance of the neighbors) and just look really cool. So we set up this system where a giant (to a 9 year old) rock was set teetering about 15 feet off the ground, and on it's way down, it would smack a series of catapults launching thus dusty dirt all over the place, and it would end up looking like a collapsing building. Aside from looking really awesome, an array of interesting (and complicated) problems needed to be solved using intuitive physics and trial and error.

Obviously you can't go launching dirt all over the place, but intertwining fun with creativity can act as a sort of rocket fuel for solving difficult, nuanced problems.