Recent content by Birkeland

Honestly, yes. I am currently on my 8th year teaching high school physics. Currently I am teaching all AP Physics. I spent an hour yesterday arguing with a parent who was worried about their child's grade, it was a B+. I had administrators pass two students who should have failed and not...

Inquiry-based physics is huge in the physics education research community, and is at the heart of the changes to both AP Physics and NGSS. If you are interested in that kind of thing, you could check out these resources. http://www2.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/publications/index.html...

At the moment no, however I have frequently spent months with most of my belongings in storage. However, that is mostly because I have not lived in one place for more than a year in the past 9 years.

I might be able to find a couple, but what level are you looking at?

I stand corrected. In that case this moves from "stupid but I understand where it comes from" back to just plain stupid

Alright, out of sheer boredom while my students were taking a final, I read the report. All it shows it that Coburn has no idea how multi-year grants work, and like much of the country thinks everything should be summarized in on sentence. Here is a quote from the "report", or as I like to...

http://www.google.com/search?q=sued%2C%20earthquakes&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&oe=&rlz=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbo=u&tbm=nws&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wn Apparently what I am getting out of this is that one guy happened to predict an earthquake using one piece of evidence. He was wrong and...

Seeing how dead the educators and teaching forum is, I was just wondering how many active members of the forums are current teachers, and what level? I am currently a high school physics teacher, with some experience as a class TA during undergrad. I am starting on a master in science...

Excellent, hope you do well!

Yeah, but look what you did. You found work to be -.784J and energy to be 5J, but you changed it to -5J and +.784, all you did was flip the minus. Don't forget in physics all a negative sign means is direction, as long as you are consistent you are fine. My guess is her negative came from...

Yeah, when I am physically teaching that is what I do, something about the forum environment makes me want to rush things. Could be several reasons, maybe she defined directions different, ect. However if you use the numbers you got it should work out to the same answer. Don't worry...

Figure out how much energy is lost due to friction on the horizontal part, subtract that from the total energy it started with (which can be used by looking at the elastic potential energy). Once you have the total energy it has when it starts up the ramp it should be simple to find the height...

Wow, it makes me sad that I would be the only here whose first thought was FORTRAN! In general, just pick a language and work through it. While all languages have their differences, once you learn how to program in one language you can pick up any other language pretty quickly. So just...

Hopefully you check before you go to school tomorrow because that is perfect.

Did you convert the 15cm to 0.15m? Otherwise the process you described is correct. Actually, I just did the problem backwards. Using their "correct answer" of 34 m/s means the bumper must move 1.5 m, not 0.15. Basically the back of you book is wrong.