Physics tutoring from someone who genuinely loves it

Who this is for

Physics is the subject where hard work most often fails to pay off on its own. A student can read the chapter, follow every example in class, and still sit down to a problem set with no idea how to begin. That isn't a knowledge problem — it's a method problem, and it's teachable.

We work with high school students meeting kinematics and forces for the first time, senior students facing a genuinely demanding final, and university students in introductory mechanics or electricity and magnetism. Cosmic Concept Tutoring was founded by an astrophysics graduate, so physics is the subject we're most often asked for — and the one we're most enthusiastic about teaching.

What we cover

• Kinematics in one and two dimensions, including projectile motion
• Forces, Newton's laws, friction, inclines and free-body diagrams
• Work, energy, power and conservation principles
• Momentum, impulse and collisions
• Circular motion, gravitation and orbits
• Static electricity, circuits, and electromagnetism
• Waves, sound and optics
• Special relativity, quantum basics and nuclear physics
• Course specifics: Physics 11, Physics 12, AP Physics, and calculus-based or engineering physics at university
• Lab work: understanding the underlying concepts, structuring lab reports and working through assignment problems step by step

Where students commonly struggle

The biggest sticking point is translation: converting a paragraph of text into a labelled diagram with knowns, unknowns and a chosen coordinate system. Students who skip this step guess at formulas. We make the setup non-negotiable, and problems that felt random start falling into recognisable families.

Free-body diagrams are the second. Vectors, components and sign conventions cause more lost marks in mechanics than any conceptual misunderstanding. The third is intuition that contradicts the physics — the belief that motion needs a continuing force, or that heavier things fall faster. We surface those beliefs deliberately rather than talking over them, because unaddressed intuitions resurface on exams.

How sessions work

One-on-one, planned around the current unit and the next test. We work problems together with the student driving and us prompting, rather than the student watching a solution appear. Every session includes at least one unfamiliar problem attempted from scratch, because that's the exam skill. We track recurring error types — sign errors, unit errors, wrong principle chosen — and target them specifically, and we build structured review before finals.

In person and online

In-person sessions run across Metro Vancouver; online sessions run worldwide over Zoom with a shared whiteboard where diagrams and derivations are built live and saved for the student. Scheduling is flexible across time zones, which works well for students in other countries and for university students fitting sessions around labs.

Physics students very often also want math tutoring or chemistry tutoring. Not local? See online tutoring worldwide.

We also work with students who have ADHD or other learning challenges, breaking work into manageable steps and keeping sessions structured and calm.

Course-specific help

We have dedicated pages for the senior physics courses:

• Physics 11 tutoring
• Physics 12 tutoring