It's only a test..

I did it. I took my Praxis 2 Physics content exam today after about 1 month of trying to remember what I learned 10 years ago in my 5 years of HS/College Physics. I haven't posted anything for a while now and I've had lots of things running through my mind that I thought were worth getting down.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard "you'll do fine" or "don't worry about it" in the past month. I can't say that I was worried about it per se but I also was not willing to just take for granted that I would do fine without some major review.

Up until about a month ago, I was planning to revisit all the odd problems from my college first year physics text and take the test next summer. Why the odd problems? Because the answers are in the back of the book of course!

I was on chapter 3 of 37 when I started to look at other options and to research the exam a bit more. My content exam was a paper based test with limited test dates to choose from. I seem to recall there being 5 or 6 text dates in one academic year. The first text date of the 2010-11 school year was today (conveniently the last Saturday before my fall quarter of grad courses start). All the other test dates fall somewhere smack dab in the middle of a quarter. I know myself as a student and studying for this exam and my courses is not a viable option while working full time.

Hence, I decided to dive in and take it now rather than wait a year.

I purchased a review text (very superficial coverage of the material) and a suite of practice exams from an online provider and started my studying.

In the process of studying, I realized that I hadn't really learned the material last time I encountered it. Back then I had learned how to solve problems by plugging numbers into formulas but I probably couldn't have explained to you what was going on. This underlying concern has been a source of anxiety for me in the past 6 months during my observation hours. I witnessed students coming up with off the wall examples of oscillatory motion and the teacher turned to me for comments on whether or not they were simple harmonic motion. I had a gut feeling that they weren't but I didn't understand SHM enough to say beyond a shadow of a doubt so instead I questioned my decision to go into teaching and had a mini melt down.

The importance of teaching/learning for understanding became so obvious to me as I wrote out about 200 flashcards for about 1/3 of the review material and still didn't "get it."

So I did the only thing I could think to do - I tweeted - and my PLN came to the rescue.

Thanks to @fnoschese for passing along the multi-media web resources that most certainly were responsible for my confidence today. It is, however, only a test! The real success for me in this process was that for the first time I was focused on understanding rather than memorizing. I looked at the formulas with an eye towards talking through the relationships between the variables and really understanding them. It is working towards this understanding for myself and for my future students that will make teaching and learning physics worthwhile.

I am so grateful that in the process of studying for this exam, I actually have learned something.

Thanks for reading. - Andrea

In case anyone is interested, here are the resources that @fnoschese suggested:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%22ap_physics_b%22
https://online-s.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys212/gtm/No_Login/page.html
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%22ap_physics_c%22
https://online-s.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys211/gtm/No_Login/page.html