My Nonprofit Reviews

I took my first Modeling course at ASU in the summer of 2003 and decided to pursue my Masters there, finishing in 2006. I was in my 22nd year of teaching physics in 2003, using a more or less textbook approach. I had been trained to be a biology teacher, but has mostly taught physics by this point. I had read and reread and gone through all of the high school physics that I could find to beef up my background. I tried to incorporate as much rigor, problem-solving, and even competitive challenges that I could think of. My first Modeling course caused me to completely change tactics. I began to look at physics and physics education much differently. I will admit that I could never completely refrain from doing a little hand-holding for anxious learners by providing them affirmation for their work and progress or giving them the occasional nudge in the right direction when they were floundering. Still I became a firm believer in the need to constantly place experimental evidence in front of inquiring young scientists so that they could form deeply held views of Newtonian Mechanics, Wave Mechanics, and Electricity and Magnetism. I retired in 2013, but taught four summers of Upward Bound, continuing in the modeling tradition. Finally, I taught two sections of introductory physics for two semesters at the University of Maine Farmington where I combined Modeling Mechanics with four chapters from the old astronomy chapters in Project Physics which I converted to the same modeling methodology.