Because I am a tutor for secondary students, most people assume that I know everything that needs to be known about those classes. However, that could not be further from the truth. In fact, I frequently encounter problems that the students I help have that I cannot answer. It’s not even that I don’t know the answer. Sometimes, it’s just so far back in my mind that I don’t remember what the exact steps are.

I find it a bit of a mild tragedy that we as students don’t get to feel the joy of discovery while learning new scientific concepts. Classrooms talk about DNA, magnetism, electricity, gravitation, chemistry, and evolution as if they are mundane things. Ideas are introduced, but rarely is there any sort of “discovery” by the students. Instead, the information is clearly meted out in logical sections with almost no flair.

When I first started learning about physics, I thought it was amazing how we had these equations and patterns that emerge in nature to the point that we could actually predict what would happen if we threw an object or slid it on a certain surface. The classes were interesting to me because they allowed us to describe things we actually saw.

I remember when I was in secondary school, my class learned about conjectures in mathematics class. This section was probably one of the most confusing part of my mathematics class because there was nothing definite about it. I found it strange how we went about doing these problems, and I was happy that we didn’t spend too much time on it (a sign that I probably should have spent more time on it).