Physics 11 tutoring

If your child is taking Physics 11 right now

For most students this is their first proper physics course, and the adjustment catches families off guard. Science up to this point rewards students who learn material thoroughly. Physics 11 rewards students who can take an unfamiliar situation, work out what matters in it, and reason forward. Thorough studying alone does not produce that, which is why hard-working students sometimes see their first disappointing science mark here.

The good news is that this is a skill, not a talent. Almost every student who "cannot do physics" is actually missing a repeatable method for starting a problem, and that can be taught directly.

What the course covers

The physics involved is classical and stable. Students study motion — describing how objects move using position, velocity, and acceleration, and representing that motion with graphs. They then study why objects move the way they do: forces, Newton's laws, friction, and the analysis of situations with several forces acting at once. Energy follows, along with the idea that energy is conserved and can be traced as it changes form, and momentum as a second conserved quantity in collisions.

Most Physics 11 courses also introduce waves and their behaviour, some optics, and basic electric circuits — current, voltage, resistance, and how these combine in series and parallel. Running through all of it is measurement: units, significant figures, uncertainty, and the interpretation of experimental data.

Where students commonly get stuck

Kinematics graphs are the first common wall. Reading a velocity-time graph and saying what the object is physically doing — and understanding that the slope and the area under the curve both mean something — is a genuinely different skill from calculating with a formula. Students who skip this struggle for the rest of the year, because graph literacy is assumed later.

Free-body diagrams are the second, and they are the biggest single source of lost marks in the course. Students either draw forces that are not acting, omit ones that are, or draw the diagram correctly and then fail to resolve components on an incline. We make diagram-first a non-negotiable habit, because almost every forces question becomes routine once the diagram is right.

Choosing between energy, momentum, and forces is the third. Many problems can technically be attacked several ways, but only one is quick, and students who have memorised formulas rather than understood conservation pick badly and run out of time. Vectors add a further layer: signs, directions, and components trip up students who treat physics as arithmetic.

How sessions are structured for this course

Sessions are built around a consistent method: describe the situation in words, draw it, label what is known and unknown, decide which principle applies, and only then reach for algebra. We insist on that order even for easy questions, because it is what holds up on hard ones and under exam pressure.

We also make the student do the explaining. Having them talk through why they chose an approach exposes shaky reasoning that a correct final answer can hide. Alongside that we work on the practical marks — units, significant figures, uncertainty, and lab write-ups — because those points are straightforward to secure once someone shows the student what markers want.

Sessions run in person across Metro Vancouver or online over Zoom with an interactive whiteboard, where diagrams and graphs can be drawn and redrawn together.

Related pages

This course is part of our physics tutoring. Other physics courses we support:

• Physics 12 tutoring