Is my physics professor hindering my understanding of the subject?

[Intervenient]

Long story short, I'm about to fail my first (and only) physics class.

While I'll admit that I have not been particularly motivated, I can't help but think that my professor is someone responsible. While my other engineering friends talk about how their professors help apply the basic principles to different scenarios, thus building up a sort of physics intuition, my professor spends the entire 50 minutes of class deriving equations. We typically deal with anywhere from 20 to 40 different equations per class period. He then assigns homework which is entirely scenario based, in which the class has no experience with.


I've come to terms that I'll likely fail this class. It's cool, whatever. BUT I'd like to know next time around if it's just a matter of a steep learning curve of finding applications of these literally hundreds of equations and I need to find a way how to find the answers, or if I just happened to get a more theoretical professor.

 

[johng23]

This will not be the last time you have a professor who spends a lot of time deriving equations and doesn't do a good job of explaining the physical significance or application of them. It's unfortunate, but blaming the professor won't get you anywhere, so you need to learn how to succeed in that type of class. It's up to you to work through the derivations until you can make sense of what it all means and which of the equations are ACTUALLY fundamental.

When you go through 40 equations in a lecture, it is never the case that they are all equally relevant. Usually most of them are steps in between other more central results. You need to mess around with the equations on your own to familiarize yourself with how they are related, and only after doing that do the 40 equations start to look like a meaningful sequence of ideas instead of just a laundry list. Many professors will not assign the straightforward mathematical manipulations of working between various equations, and if that's the case you need to do that on your own.

If there is a textbook for the course, it will likely give more descriptions of the equations than your professor.

Good luck!

 

[Intervenient]

My problem wasn't necessarily the amount of what was going on, but rather the lack of clarity for applications. I sort of get where they are derived from and how, but I have no idea how that helps with knowing about hanging chandeliers or men skying off snowballs or etc etc.

How does one go about succeeding in a class such as this? Where do you physics types find the motivation to work through and understand applications? What's the BEST way I can tackle the class the second time?
EDIT:
I realize I seem like a bitter, lazy, angry soul. I take full responsibility for my situation to get the point of no return. I should have found help earlier.

 

[zcd]

If it's your first physics class there should only be a handful of the basic equations. As for applications try to look at the examples to see the pattern behind how they turn a complicated real world situation into a simple model and you'll likely see how the fundamental equations are used.

More specifically chandeliers tend to appear in pendulum problems which uses the idea of conservation of energy. From there you can bring in gravitational potential and kinetic energy to find height from velocity or the other way around.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm afraid to say that you missed the point of the lectures.

The professor's goals were not to derive 1000 equations over the term. What he was surely doing was showing you how to start with a small number of equations, perhaps 20, and derive whatever you need for a specific problem. Now, he may very well have been doing a bad job at this, but that's what he was shooting for.

How much effort did you spend on taking notes on what he was writing vs. taking notes on what he was saying?

 

[physics girl phd]

You're right: you do need to learn problem solving skills, if not in this class, then elsewhere. Presumably at some point in your life (of course this depends a bit on your job and field), you'll have a problem where an exact example isn't given and perhaps the most applicable information you can find is in some book with NO examples whatsoever. Therefore it's perhaps unfortunate that you didn't get lots of examples and "intuition building" in your class (in this "work-training period" so to speak), but there are certainly other ways to get this. I'll note, however, in some courses, time is so limited that a professor has to make decisions. (In one of my summer engineering-physics courses, I dropped half the "lectures" about conceptual understanding just to have additional days of nothing but problems solving (there is no recitation associated with the course). I have mixed feelings about that, but I have had students come back to thank me for teaching them how to solve rigorous calculus-based problems, preparing them for their next level of engineering coursework.)

Here's my suggestions:

Others mention the text, I'll give one specific about how to use it better: If example problems are given in your text (like they should be for an undergraduate intro class), did you ever take the example, copy it onto paper, and then try to work it on your own (preferably before, but perhaps even some time after reading through it)?

Is there a tutor-center available? If so, use it. (As an upper-level undergraduate student I was employed in one of these, where I spent ALL my time teaching how to solve problems and check the solution to see if it made sense... some students in the premed physics seemed to spend the whole term living in that tutor-center!)

Is there a lab associated with the class? (While a lot of labs seem canned, the idea of taking data and figuring out how to make it "make sense" of it is extremely important to problem solving, and if anything, hopefully the lab helps familiarize you with UNITS. It's always important to carry units with you in your math problem-solving, and make sure units make sense at the end.)

 

[Angry Citizen]

My professor was exactly like that. Almost never did an actual physics problem as an example. He derived generic solutions and let us have at it. I came out of both classes with a B. It's your fault entirely that you cannot grasp the physics.

It is ill-advised to blame others for your own shortcomings. The point of first-year physics isn't to be a god of physics and know how to apply it to every situation; it is to teach you how to solve problems and to develop a physical intuition that will carry over into an advanced physics or engineering class. It is usually a pretty grueling course, and if it's not, then the professor is not doing his job right. It is not his job to hold your hand through the course. Throwing you to the wolves, so to speak, is one of the best things he can do.

 

[Intervenient]

edit

 

[khemist]

One of the most important things in physics for me was finding a method for solving problems that worked in many situations. My physics 1 teacher was huge on it. She stressed the steps in drawing the free body diagram, decide the knowns and unknowns, apply F = ma (if necessary), and solve. My physics 2 teacher was similar; he would write down everything that was known (say, capacitance = 1 uF, resistance = 1 ohm, etc), things that need to be found, and then recognize the relationships between them.

 

[Fizex]

This is common in classes with TA sections where the TA would help you apply the equations derived in lecture to problem solving. Did your class have this? Otherwise you should have formed a study group. Your college might have a tutor center available too where you can get help from peers.