Physics has a reputation for being the hard one, and it is – but not for the reason students think. It is not the maths. The maths in Physics 11 is lighter than in Pre-Calculus 11. What makes Physics hard is that it refuses to let you get away with a vague idea. Either you know what is happening or you do not, and the numbers will expose which.
After years of teaching BC Physics, the same handful of topics come up again and again.
Vectors, and the moment direction starts mattering
Most students arrive at Physics 11 having only ever handled quantities that are just a size. Then suddenly a quantity has a direction attached, and adding two of them is not adding two numbers.
The specific place it breaks is components. A student can draw the triangle and still not really believe that a single force can be treated as two forces at right angles that happen to add up to it. Until that clicks, every inclined-plane problem is guesswork. The fix is slow and visual: lots of diagrams, resolving before calculating, and refusing to write a single equation until the picture is drawn.
Kinematics graphs read the wrong way round
Position-time, velocity-time and acceleration-time graphs are a classic exam trap because they look simple. Students learn “slope is velocity” and “area is displacement” as two facts to memorise, then get a question where the graph dips below the axis and the memorised rules stop making sense.
What works is going back to what the axes actually mean, every time, before touching the slope. A velocity-time graph below the axis means moving backwards, and once a student can say that out loud without hesitating, negative areas stop being frightening.
Newton’s third law, misremembered
Nearly every student can recite it. Far fewer can apply it, because the reciting version – “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” – suggests forces cancel, which would mean nothing ever accelerates.
The correction is that the two forces act on different objects. The moment a student internalises that, free-body diagrams get much easier, because they finally know which forces belong on which diagram.
Energy problems attempted with kinematics
In Physics 12, a lot of problems are solvable two ways: the long way with kinematics equations, or the short way with conservation of energy. Students who never got comfortable with energy default to the long way, run out of time, and lose marks on questions they could have done in three lines.
Recognising which tool a question is asking for is a skill in itself, and it is worth practising deliberately: read ten problems, do not solve any of them, just decide which approach each one wants.
Circuits, where the intuition is genuinely wrong
Series and parallel circuits break most students’ mental model, because the model most people carry – current gets “used up” as it goes round – is simply false. Current is conserved. Voltage is what gets divided.
This one needs replacing rather than patching. We usually spend a whole session on it, with the student predicting what a meter will read before calculating, so the wrong intuition gets confronted rather than politely ignored.
The habits that quietly cost marks
Beyond the concepts: units missing from final answers, significant figures ignored, negative signs dropped during rearrangement, and answers given without a sentence of explanation where the question asked for one. In BC Physics papers, method marks are real. A student who shows a clear diagram and a stated equation gets partial credit even when the arithmetic goes wrong.
Getting help
Our Physics tutoring in Surrey covers Physics 11, Physics 12 and first-year university physics, in small groups or one-on-one. If maths is part of the problem, Pre-Calculus support usually runs alongside it. Call 604-725-6845 or book a trial class.
