AP physics 1 killing anyone else beside me ?

<p>@Kawaiii it could be they’re doing things in a different order than you are.</p>

<p>In my APP2 class we started with T.D rather than electricity.</p>

<p>@QuadMaster‌ You may be right but aren’t Forces like… a fundamental part of physics? You need it for Momentum, Circular Motion, Gravitation, and pretty much everything. </p>

<p>I took physics my sophomore year, but then they made the whole ap physics 1 and 2 thing, and ap physics 1 is basically a do-over of physics. I’m really dreading next semester. If I hadn’t taken the class before, I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything! My teacher is really… well, he’s a teacher. But he doesn’t teach. He just talks at us, and then gets frustrated when we ask him to explain anything. </p>

<p>I’ve found that I understand the material a lot better when I actually do the work. If I zone out or skip a day, I get super confused. Maybe it’d help your grade (in the future if you’re talking physics 2) if you would look at the frq on collegeboard. Even if you don’t understand it, you might see the same question on the test, and that’d be free points. The best thing would be if you understood the concepts, but high school has grades. And grades matter. Sadly.</p>

<p>@Kawaiiii‌
There is a traditional order which would go along the lines of something like:

  1. kinematics
  2. forces
  3. energy/work
  4. momentum
  5. rotation
  6. simple harmonic oscillation
  7. gravitation</p>

<p>You can switch up the order though (especially with the last two where you could introduce SHO during energy and gravity with forces). It’s harder to introduce things like energy and momentum before forces though although it could be done by giving an incomplete treatment of the topic. </p>

<p>For example you could introduce momentum before forces as the product of mass and velocity and everything is fine, no need for forces. But then you get to collisions and the differences between the types having to do with kinetic energy. Still fine no forces yet, but then you have to define kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is defined through work. Now we have to define work and that is directly connected to forces. </p>

<p>The point of that example is that you could stop at kinetic energy and the teacher could say “just take it on faith that kinetic energy is energy of motion and the equation for it is 1/2mv^2” and that would be very close to a complete treatment of momentum without having to introduce forces. (although this doesn’t fly when doing calculus based physics because the two are closely connected through differential equations as are most quantities).</p>

<p>Circular motion is also another topic where you could dodge the forces but you probably have me on gravity as far as AP physics 1 goes (although some people could go quantum mechanical and make an argument that gravity has nothing to do with forces).</p>

<p>@jimmyboy23‌ I see, thanks for that explanation, but is there any reason why someone would choose to skip Forces instead of just learning it from the beginning? </p>

<p>And what problem for circular motion wouldn’t require you to know forces?</p>

<p>In my class we learned kinematics first and then went on to forces and combined momentum with work and energy. </p>

<p>Honestly, the forces unit was sooo much better for me than the others. Has anyone done really well during on unit and then terrible during the others? I dont know what it really is, BUT i am guessing it has to do with how much more visual working with forces are than with other units. I am a very visual learner so just drawing the force diagram helps me SO much. It has been the only unit so far I feel confident in, but the others have been so much more difficult for me :(</p>

@asthrera Not really. Things like Horizontal and Vertical Components and momentum are pretty easy but forces problems such as car on hill or how to balance out a hang object and an object on a tilt surface are so hard for me to grasp.

Took regular physics now I’m in AP physics 1 cause my school doesn’t offer AP physics C. One is supposed to an introductory course with an AP exam. Major difference I noticed between regular and AP 1 is on our schedule we won’t be doing thermodynamics or a brief touch up on modern day physics (relativity and some particle phenomena from the standard model) in AP 1.