Week 4 Reflection

This week in physics a lot of graphing work and discussion took place. Much time was taken to explain symbols for objects on our graph. For example, x represents position and the y-intercept represents the initial starting position. In addition, we also started looking at velocity and the difference between distance and displacement. Today in fact we started discovering the difference between distance and displacement and physically watching my teacher walk to describe displacement helped a ton with my understanding. It's one thing to look at it on a graph, but it's another to actually witness it in action. I've never felt that I've been a visual learner, although it never hurt, but in physics I feel that it clarifies many examples and clearly helps my understanding of the matter. I learn physics and aspects about myself. Cool, right?

On Wednesday we looked at a worksheet that discussed velocity verse time. In this particular problem the object's velocity was 2 meters for every 1 second. The object moving had a constant speed of 2m/1s for an overall time of 4 seconds. Therefore, on the graph it represented a horizontal line at a velocity of 2 meters and continued from 0 seconds to 4 seconds. I understood that the velocity was constant for all 4 seconds, but I didn't understand how the velocity was already at 2 meters when 0 seconds had passed. However, its was explained to me that it didn't represent position and meant that from 0 seconds to 1 second the object traveled 2 meters. Speed is very much different than position.

One of the primarly things I love about my physics class is that everything that we complete gets explained. And if we don't have time, we make time. We don't focus on rushing through topics just to get through them; our main focus is to understand the material, even if that means we spend more time on them than planned. For example, my teacher planned for us to have a practice assessment today, but because our discussion needed additional time, the assessment would have to wait. He didn't try to cut our time to understand as a group, which would ultimately result in lower scores on the assessment. It's nice to know that my teacher actually cares about your learning and not just the grade.

It's not about the answer; it's about the process.
TmPhys12