Today’s hot topic in Physics. I was often asked about how to study Physics and many people have worries about handling topics in Physics. Physics in fact is not all that difficult. For many people, difficulties in Physics are purely psychological and many a time they will be carrying an impression or opinion of others and senior students or friends.
Concepts in Physics are generally interesting if one keeps an open approach to the subject. As such one should enjoy what he/she is studying. Generally, students would come under extra pressure due to the prevailing highly competitive environment. Physics is one of the prerequisites for graduate and postgraduate courses in sciences, medicine, engineering, agriculture, Pharmacy, etc. For admission into almost all such courses, one must compete with others in the skills of Physics. Especially in India, an aspiring student of engineering and medicine must have taken Physics as one of the subjects at 10+2 level. And one must excel in the entrance examination in which Physics is one of the compulsory subjects. Therefore to make a professional career in sciences, engineering and medicine, skills in Physics are unavoidable. This would bring an enormous amount of pressure to all students. Performance worries would bring down our abilities to acquire such skills to half. While studying Physics one should keep all worries about performance away.
Skills in Physics require basic mathematical skills. Learning Physics has three dimensions to it.
- Learning concepts, laws, mathematical expressions of concepts, applications of concepts in natural phenomena and their practical applications in everyday life.
- Experimental skills. One must learn and must have performed experiments in physics to understand them better. For this, one must learn as many concepts as possible through experiments. Some experiments may not be prescribed in your school curriculum.
- The above 2 dimensions would give us the basic ammunition to handle numerical and logical problems in Physics. Every student has to practice as many problems as possible. Practising numerical problems would ultimately help us in building our skills in Physics.
Solving numerical problems in itself is a skill. For this, one must have good reading skills. Problems in Physics are generally verbose and word problems. One must have the skills to gather data while reading the problems. Should acquire the ability to convert problem statements made in English into logical mathematical expressions. One must also possess skills to represent the problem statements into pictorial representation and identifying the directions and quantities accurately. All the known quantities and the quantities that are to be computed must be identified in the diagram. It would give us a comprehensive and visual representation of the problem. Especially in mechanics and elsewhere one may have to draw the diagrams called Free Body Diagrams (FBD). As we do more and more problems, our understanding of the concepts would also get enhanced. The fine print in the laws and their limitations will be well understood by solving numerical problems. Solving problems in iterations of levels and complexity is also important.
There are some basic characters that one must cultivate. This is not only for Physics, it is applicable for all subjects (including linguistics, arts, commerce, etc) and skills.
- A high degree of discipline.
- Sense of time, considering the count down into race. Time is a limited and continuously depleting resource.
- Perseverance: This is an extremely important quality. One should not leave a problem or an exercise on the basis of difficulty or lack of time or not getting an answer.
- Self-planning/re-planning.
- Self-checking and identifying the improvement areas.
- Goal setting and converting goals into plans sub plans and traceable and verifiable activities.
- Apart from listening (attending lessons in school, coaching institute, tuition, etc) and home works/assignments/updating records, one must spend at least 2 hrs per subject of self-study on daily basis. All the listening part will only help in the basic understanding of a given topic. Daily self-study would be required to consolidate the learning and in honing the skills further and further and in evolving strategies and preparing in a given topic for the D-Day.
There are methods, tools, ways and means to manage these learning qualities. However one must be innovative in making things work for him/her. Despite spending top earned money on books, coaching, etc success is never guaranteed. There is no single method that works for all. High school mathematics is very good in India, science at the high school level is grossly inadequate. Students reach class 11 and 12 with many gaps in basic skills in Mathematics. However, our skills in mathematics are what would set the tone in our learning at the 10+2 level. Last but not the least, the expectations built on the individuals. It would only complicate matters.