Most of the time, when a student tells me they are bad at physics, what they actually mean is that nobody has ever explained it to them in a language they already speak. That is a translation problem, not an ability problem, and it is fixable.
So this section exists to be the explanation I wish someone had handed me: slower where it matters, honest about what is genuinely hard, and never pretending a step is obvious when it isn’t.
Lab Help
Short answers to the questions that come up every week in the physics labs I teach: uncertainty, graphs, lab reports, and what the equipment is actually doing. Start here if you are in one of my sections.
Get unstuckPython from Scratch
A full series for people who have never written a line of code. Starts with what a computer is actually doing, then moves into Python you can run right here in the page — nothing to install.
Open the seriesMathematics Lessons
The mathematics physics students keep running into, built up from where it comes from rather than dropped in as a formula to memorise.
Browse lessonsPhysics Problems
Worked textbook problems with the reasoning left in — including the part where you decide which approach to try before you know it will work.
Browse problemsHow these are written
I try to hold to a few rules across everything in this section.
Start below the starting point. If a lesson needs an idea from three courses ago, the lesson explains that idea rather than assuming it. The Python series opens with information theory for exactly this reason.
Name the hard part out loud. Some things are genuinely difficult. Saying “as you can clearly see” about a step that took me an hour is a disservice, and it teaches students that their confusion is a personal failing.
Give you something to poke at. Reading about a for loop does very little. Running one, breaking it, and running it again does quite a lot. Code on this site is live wherever it can be.
Keep the physics attached to something real. Every abstraction started as someone trying to answer a concrete question. That question is usually the best way in.
There is more on where this comes from in my teaching philosophy.
Found a mistake?
I would genuinely like to know. Email me at s.stockton@tcu.edu — corrections, confusing passages, and “this section lost me at paragraph three” are all useful.