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Comment by sgc | Hacker News Reader

My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.

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How do they not know?! The parents at my school would gladly purchase materials for the classes if anyone bothered to ask for them.

Your average teacher is about as intelligent, motivated, and skilled as your average American.

How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?

I’ve never heard anyone say freshman physics is the hardest class in high school!

Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.

AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.

What did your daughter find challenging?

Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest (plus digging in to the building blocks of the previous class). Physics first is very much throwing them in at the deep end of the pool when they have never taken a high school class at all. Frankly, I never got the details of the curriculum due to lack of printed materials. Parenting is not easy, and it's an art not a science. I got her a tutor instead of risking giving her the impression her grades were more important than her to me because I was pushing her too hard. Her tutor helped a lot and had plenty of materials to help out. So no, my kid's not dumb ;)

> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics, which is from funnest and easiest to most technical and hardest

More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.

The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.

There is a thing called pedagogy, and biology > chemistry > physics is a perfectly healthy order of discovery. I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.

> I am not sure why there needs to be a battle of the sexes in the middle of this.

I am not sure either, but there is, and ignoring it means that school gets optimized for girls and seatbelts optimized for men. You have to bring that up to change it.

It sounds like something specific to US education, though. When I was in school, physics actually started first in 6th grade, while biology and chemistry both started in the 7th grade - but from there on the classes were all going concurrently.

Physics also tends to expect some understanding of calculus... which tends to be a junior or senior level class. Having someone take a physics class when they're still struggling with single variable substitution in equations would be torturous to student and teacher alike.

There are calculus free science programs

My high school back in the early 00s had an algebra-based physics track and a calculus-based. We were a smaller school so they alternated every year. Take it junior / senior year depending on what version you wanted to take.

Science teacher here. Physics First is absolutely not throwing them into the deep end, and should not be the hardest class. Physics First generally means physics taught without calculus, and most of it is stuff that could have been taught to most eighth graders.

Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)

I am sure you are right, my physics class was my hardest class in HS, but I took it my senior year. Regardless, her school is science and tech focused, and it was a hard class without materials to study for tests, and with minimal guidance.

Mandatory xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/435/

> Most schools do biology > chemistry > physics

I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.

I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.

For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.

In the NL we start with a combined chemistry/physics class that's mostly physics, after the 2nd year you get physics, chemistry and biology as separate classes.

I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.

At the high school level of presentation and rigor, Biology is hard and boring full of memorization without anything that reduces or compresses the data. Chemistry is very hard, lots of memorization and also lots of mathematical thinking. Physics is easy, very few basic laws that are quite intuitive and whose proofs you are not expected to learn and links in most directly to real life things you can feel and experience such as levers, moments etc.

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