The Hunt for High School Homeschool Physics Curriculum

This will likely be my longest curriculum post EVER. Unless you're on the quest for high school physics for your own homeschooler, you're not likely to find this helpful or interesting. You've been warned.

Written at the end of 8th Grade: 

It took all year, but we finally found a physics curriculum that we enjoy...just in time for high school! We've had a great introduction to physics this year through Khan Academy, but it also had it's very frustrating moments. Khan Academy has good videos but does not include resources for reinforcing lesson materials or for DOING something with concepts (labs, etc...). This means that the material goes by too fast and retention is low.

We're looking forward to digging in more using The Physics Classroom, a free online resource for physics teachers and homeschoolers. We did invest $25 to order to CD with answers to the free worksheets. The CD is fabulous and includes the answer worksheets in both Word and PDF formats, as well as all the regular worksheets without answers. The answer sheets include detailed explanations, not just the short answer!

The Physics Classroom has a broad range of resources and appears to be growing constantly! The site includes online text, with sample problems embedded in the materials. Students read the text, solve the sample problem, and then click a button to reveal the answer. There are interactive demonstrations and games, suggested labs, ACT prep tests, and "Minds on Physics" modules for students to complete to demonstrate mastery of the material (using a mobile app). The mobile app comes in six student parts, each costing $1. If you wish to have a teacher account to award credit to your student, the teacher account is $50. If the student is logged in "for credit" they get a status bar and "health points." Unfortunately, when we tried the app there were clearly a lot of bugs still to be worked out, and we didn't use it.

November: 9th grade...

At the beginning of the year, I had a bit of a crisis about whether The Physics Classroom was going to cover everything we wanted with the rigor we wanted. So, I caved in and purchased the Holt McDougal Physics Homeschool Package. This was the worst homeschool curriculum mistake I have ever made. I am NOT kidding.

The homeschool package comes with a "premium" online teacher edition, which is completely impossible to navigate. Both the regular teacher's edition and the premium version are part of the package, and the parent/teacher has to sort out which materials are in which version because the premium version is simply a supplement, requiring clicking back and forth between the general teacher text and the premium content.

Only some of the problems in the student text actually have step by step solutions in the solution manual, though this is marketed to homeschoolers as a ready-to-go curriculum. Headings do not match between the teacher or student text, which means that I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to match the questions up to see if I was looking at the right problem set.

Teacher materials were organized by category (labs, quizzes, presentation materials, worksheets), rather than sequentially. Perhaps, if I had paper copies of all of these things, I could lay them out on a desk together to make plans for what to use and when, but having them online means flipping back and forth between tabs or windows constantly. Requiring the use of drop-down menus to select only discreet portions of chapter and text, rather than having all the materials for an entire chapter in one place also made it extremely difficult to reference back and forth in a chapter efficiently. I felt that I had access to a whole lot of really wonderful AND totally useless material.

In addition, there was no indication on the website that the online access to teacher materials expires in a year. I did not find this out until I received my access code. It was my impression from the website that I was purchasing a curriculum PACKAGE, not just a student text with one year of online access to teacher text, solutions, supplements, labs, and assessment tools. If I had known this I would have never, never, never purchased the "package," especially at this price. A package, in my opinion, includes more than one item.

Finally, when I called the company and begged for a refund (past the 30 day return policy...so, my bad), I was offered a paper copy of the teacher text, which, theoretically, might solve some of the problems. They said they'd send me a link in my email. They did. They send a link for me to PURCHASE the $150 Teacher Edition.  No thank you. I didn't have the will to call them back, though I should have. Again, my bad.

And, so, we went back to The Physics Classroom. I realized upon our return to The Physics Classroom that part of the reason we'd been struggling so much with the Holt text was that the explanations were both wordy and poor. The Physics Classroom teaches much of the same material more succinctly, and they do it much better. I found that the Holt book was actually skipping steps in the explanations, though the text uses way more words. Ugh. After completing another unit of The Physics Classroom, I had Mane take the Holt test for the corresponding chapter. She passed the test just fine.

But then...
In February, I realized that, although The Physics Classroom is tremendously well organized, understandable, and affordable...we were dragging our feet to get to physics every day. Now, I'll take responsibility for the fact that this is partly my fault. I had a personal crisis or realizing that my child is being cheated out of having a teacher who can actually make a the physics connects, relate fascinating examples, and pull out labs and activities to demonstrate concepts. The thing is, I'm not a physics teacher. I took physics in high school and enjoyed it. I can understand the physics textbooks. But I don't have enough experience with the material to really grab a student's attention with stories and examples. This is the plight of homeschooling. I had to make some peace with that. But that's for another post.

Perhaps the biggest downfall of The Physics Classroom is that the labs are not embedded. They have links to great labs, but they aren't part of the curriculum. They're scattered throughout the internet on other websites. The Physics Classroom people have done an extraordinary amount of work gathering resources and providing links. But, unless I put a lot of time into planning, I can't make this work for us. I need embedded labs. And I also know that labs and stories are the only things that are going to save Mane from hating physics forever. Yes, she's getting the materials (concepts, equations, and application) from The Physics Classroom, and she's getting them really well. But she's bored and views physics as just another math class.

So, I started researching. There are so many interesting podcasts, books, and movies related to physics, but I'm not in any position to cobble them together into a curriculum, and I don't want to abandon the math and equations altogether.

Then I found Guest Hollow's Conceptual Physics for High School. It is marketed as math-free, but there are optional math components (which we'll surely be using). We're on week 3. Yes, we switched. Yes, it's March. Yes, I feel a little insane. But we are SO HAPPY. Guest Hollow's curriculum is a schedule of books, movies, activities, TED Ed videos, and labs that brings all those wonderful resources together in a coherent way.

This kind of switch is not for everyone. And I confess to some trepidation. I talked with Mango all weekend long before we decided to switch. He's a high school teacher and familiar with the necessary material for doing well on the ACT. He's also put a lot of thought into what it really means to prepare students for what they want to do in life. Yes, Mane is capable of completing a very math-oriented physics program. But how will it serve her? She's a storyteller. She loves to write. If we want to give her any hope of becoming a "real" writer, she needs a foundation of stories. She also needs a foundation of the fundamental concepts and principles that make the world work. J. K. Rowling could not have written the Harry Potter series to be the rich, nuanced, and complex story that it is without the foundation of a solid education. It doesn't have to be a traditional education, but it has to be broad and deep. That's how we view the Guest Hollow curriculum. It's full of the books that make the connections between physics and real life. The books are full of history and philosophy. The movies tell the stories of real people involved in real physics in a way that kind of makes you want to try it yourself. The videos and labs are quick, fun, and memorable.

If all goes well, we'll be using this curriculum throughout the summer. It's engaging enough to consider it a fun summer family activity!

P.S. In case you're worried, the math that Mane needs to be successful on college entrance exams is included both in her actual math text (Saxon) and in the optional portion of Guest Hollow. We may also supplement to be sure the use of equations is reinforced. Likely, there will be a follow up post when we're finished. I'll let you know how it goes.