Despite what many schools actually do, I think most of us can agree that learning is highly personal. What works for you might not work for me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Thankfully, there’s more than one way to learn a subject.

One aspect of probability I’ve always found to be a little tricky is the part where you need to count things. In theory, this sounds easy enough. After all, it’s just looking at the complete list of things you’re studying, and enumerating them, right?

The pendulum is a classic physical object that is modeled in many introductory physics courses. It’s a nice system to study because it is so simple, yet still allows students to see how to study the motion of a system. Here, I want to do through the steps of deriving what is usually seen as an elementary result, the period of a pendulum, and show how it is actually more complicated than what most students see.

I’ll let you in on a bit of a secret. For most of my life, I hated doing experiments in science.