EDITORIAL: Teaching physics

King's School, Canterbury, UK

I'm working on the Physics joke book. So far I have only one joke....

Ah, sorry. That was the last thing I wrote for this section. It's easy to get confused.

Now, let us be clear about one thing for a start. This is not some less than subtle bid to take over the Editorship of this journal (proof by induction: you write editorials, therefore you are the editor). Fear not, readers, there is no revolt in the ranks! Fans of Ken Dobson will be glad to know that he will return to this space soon. My presence on successive occasions is just an unfortunate coincidence of timing.

This issue is one of our regular special features where we take a topic and dedicate the journal to its exploration. Colleagues reading this in universities or colleges of higher education will forgive (I hope) the bias of this edition to `From the Classroom'. We intend this issue to launch a column that will be regular, but not necessarily in every issue, in which ideas taken from the classroom experience of our readers are presented. With that in mind, we openly invite contributions for this column.

The sort of thing we are looking for is that tip, experiment, way of explaining an idea or nice example of a principle, which may not be of your own invention but may well be new to inexperienced teachers or new recruits to the profession. It is not just limited to those at the chalk face. We will welcome contributions from Heads of Department and Heads of Science who may well have valuable advice and hints to pass on to people taking on departmental responsibilities. There are myriad problems associated with departmental budgets, examinations, management of resources and people etc that the newly promoted have to face from day one. We can all learn from the experience of others.

The contributions need not be long; they can be in the form of a paper or a letter or a brief remark. The important thing is that, just because you have known about a trick of the trade for as long as you can remember, it does not mean that others are equally familiar with it.

By and large Physics teachers are a reticent lot when it comes to writing papers for journals such as this. As a species we seem to like to get on with our jobs quietly (at least as quietly as the vital experiments with resonant tubes will allow) and have little time for writing. If possible, this column will change that. The aim is to provide a service for others - to ensure that the `Education' in Physics Education applies equally to the people delivering the curriculum as it does to those on the receiving end. So next time you dust off that homemade widget that you thought up as a visual aid for explaining the intricacies of electromagnetic induction (or whatever) jot the design down with some well chosen words and send it to us.