Remembering high school physics

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley is getting a lot of attention, such as this review in The Economist.

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy.

It occurs to me to share my experience in high school physics more than 50 years ago.

Margaret Q. Davis taught physics in my high school. After a few days in her class she took a half dozen of us aside and informed us that she could not teach us anything; we were to go to the school library and teach ourselves physics. Fortunately the library had a small discussion room that we could take over for an hour a day. She told us to show up for an hour a day after school and she would set us physics problems to work out.

We were aware that we were the most likely students in our year to do well in a physics class. We did set about teaching ourselves from the physics text book, working through the text regularly and discussing the content.

We also did show up regularly for the after school problem sessions. We learned to solve physics problems we had never seen before.

That year we formed a team to compete in the state wide physics contest. It was a written test in which each member of each team independently worked through a set of physics problems. We won. Mrs. Davis some years later was named the physics teacher of the year for California.

Our team leader went on to invent the computer hard drive technology. I am not sure what happened to the other members of the team.