Science Grant and Fund Drive Bring New Lab Equipment to Olney
Olney Friends School is pleased to announce the successful completion of a fund drive in the sciences that raised $15,536 in matching funds to... more »
Focus on Math & Science
In the Classroom: Spotlight on Physics
Reprinted from the Fall 2011 Olney Current:
In past chapters of his professional life, Steve Martin has been a teacher, a student, a builder, a fixer, and a small business owner. In this chapter, he is a teacher first and foremost: he teaches physics, calculus, and statistics at Olney Friends School. But Steve remains a builder, having built from scratch or rehabbed many pieces of experimental equipment since arriving on campus in August – from a force table to demonstrate Newton’s third law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) to a track to show conservation of momentum (think of carts bumping into each other) to a motion table (where tiles glide on a frictionless surface) to a set of three-foot-high tuning forks (built from discarded farm equipment) to a projectile launcher (we can’t call it a “potato gun” on a Quaker campus…) to a water container demonstrating non-linear relationships (the water runs out faster in the second half of the tank, as graphed on an exponential curve).
Why does he build so many things? “Why does a sailor want to sail on the ocean?” he asks. “Some people have a passion to look at the laws of nature. It can be a spiritual thing at the deepest level. For some people, it’s just an inquisitiveness thing. We want to know how things work. Before you can know how complicated things work, you have to know how simple things work. That is what I’m teaching in my classes.”
What skills does he focus on introducing to students? “We are confirming the laws that were formulated hundreds of years ago, by Newton and others,” he says. “It can be not very exciting if you are just looking at equations on the board. When you launch a potato in the air, and watch it fly almost out of sight, that brings physics to life.”
The Statistics class focuses heavily on consumer economics. “I want them to look past advertising, to give them the ability to make choices with some freedom,” he says.
Calculus, he says, “will bring together every piece of math you’ve been taught for the previous 12 years. Many occupations in science, math, and business rely on processes that in turn rely on important equations that involve finding the slopes of functions, calculating logarithms, or finding the areas under curves,” he says. He cites stock market fluctuations as one example.
How is he getting students ready for college? “More than anything else, I am ridding them of the fear of the word ‘calculus,’ the word ‘physics,’ and the word ‘statistics,’” he says. “They won’t be standing by. They will be in there playing the game. I want to get the concepts across at an early level. And equally important, I want to give them the audacity to believe they can succeed.”
What else does he want people to know? “The public needs to know how important math and science are. I was the only physics major my year in college. As our world becomes more complex, it is vital not only for students to be fluent in the humanities, but in addition to know their way around the sciences.”