Teachers Pay Teachers is now TPT

Once upon a time there were Digital Video Discs (or was it Disks?) and/or Digital Versatile Discs. No more. Now there are DVDs. What do the apparent initials stand for? They don't stand for anything. The discs are simply DVDs.

I believe that once upon a time, there was Physics Education Technology. Now there is PhET.

I'm sure more examples abound. Now we can pour one out for Teachers Pay Teachers. The service isn't going away. It's now simply TPT. The initialism had been in common use for years, and the company's leaning into it.

The rebranding is not universally welcome in the physics teaching community. The American Association of Physics Teachers' official journal, The Physics Teacher, has been published since 1963, and is often referred to as TPT.

I do not foresee either institution changing their practices out of deference to the other. We've survived multiple meanings for ATM, CD, CRT, EMT, etc.. We'll power through this duplication.

Paul Hewitt's Next Time Questions

Next-Time Questions are favorite insightful questions I have asked my students over my teaching career. I have embellished them with cartoons to catch interest. Their intention is to elicit student thinking. My use of them was posting several in a glass case outside my lecture hall—without answers. The wait-time for answers was one week. I could have called them Next-Week Questions, which would have been more appropriate.

Most of these have been published over the years as Figuring Physics in The Physics Teacher magazine. They have also been in ancillaries to my Conceptual Physics textbooks, and physical science textbooks as well. My hope is that teachers will pose the questions, and withhold answers to “next time,” which could be as early as the next class meeting. Their educational value is the long wait time!

The Blowgun as a Teaching Tool

One of the first things I acquired through the bureaucratic school district purchase requisition process was Pasco Scientific's Lenz's Law Demonstrator. As a newly-minted classroom teacher, I found the prices in supplier catalogs to by eye-popping. (I have a better understanding of the economics and value propositions of those prices now.)

I used the satin-finished aluminum tube and magnets for its intended purpose right away. 

I then added some intrigue/obfuscation by hiding a stack of potent neodymium magnets inside a hollowed out red whiteboard marker. I told students that the tube could detect the marker's color and try to stop the fall of the red marker. To "prove" my point, I would drop an unmodified green marker through the tube showing that the tube offered no resistance. Some students would demand up-close inspection. They found the red marker was heavier: the heavier marker fell more slowly!

I typically ran this demo on the first day of school as part of my "Physics Begins with an M" first day of school lesson. The explanation had to wait until second semester, when we studied magnetism.

Since this demo was so costly, I felt I had to add value. I found I could balance it vertically on my classroom floor to demonstrate unstable equilibrium. And when it toppled over, the sound it made could pierce your soul. Students would emit involuntary screams. 

Holding the tube with thumb and forefinger at various places while gently bouncing it on the tile floor produced different notes as different resonance modes were activated.