Week of October 8, 2018

This is a three-day week for students due to parent-teacher conferences. That means there are just two-and-a-half weeks until the close of the first quarter grading period. Please be sure to stay on top of PowerSchool so you can feel awesome on October 26 when you see your grade! Yeah!

This Week in AP Physics
It’s all downhill on Monday as we complete our Friction and Vector Analysis of Forces experiment and then do a very short (only four page) packet of tremendously great problems to solve. We will also continue our unit notes so that on Tuesday and Wednesday we can do our final packet for the unit and homework 4, which will be due on Wednesday. We would have had the unit 3 test on Thursday, but the short week means it will be Monday or Tuesday of the following week, depending on your preference, noting that if we delay the test until Tuesday we’ll likely begin the unit 4 on that Monday.

This Week in Physics
For Monday please take notes on the first video from unit 2Introduction to Vector Operations. We will practice vector addition in class and will then do assignment 1 together. Next, when assigned, please take notes on the second video from unit 2, Vector Resolution. We’ll practice vector resolution in class and will then do assignment 2 together AND go outside for a treasure hunt! By the end of the week expect a quiz over goal set 1 as announced.

Cool Science of the Week
This week the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a woman for the first time in fifty-five years, and for only the third time in its 117-year history. (Canadian physicist Donna Strickland shares the 2018 Prize with two male physicists for work in laser physics.) The Nobel Committee has even awarded the Prize to men when women did the work, such as was the case in 1974 when astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars but saw the Prize go to the man who was her adviser. Prize or no Prize, there are plenty of women doing groundbreaking work in physics. To my women students, consider yourself invited to the party!

Women Nobel Prize in Physics recipients Marie Curie (1903), and Donna Strickland (2018), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963)