Physics classes at school follow the concept of a “flipped classroom,” allowing students to learn new content and follow lectures at home, then practice problems and concepts in class. For example, Advanced Placement Physics C: Mechanics and Electromagnetics students listen to almost an hour of lectures every other night, then return to class to drill the new topics. This system was popularized by FlippingPhysics, a channel integral to the school’s AP Physics teaching curriculum. The Falconer interviewed the channel’s creator, Jonathan Thomas-Palmer, or Mr. P to his audience, for his life experience as a content creator, retired teacher and experience in “flipping” physics.

Where did your passion for physics begin?

“I don’t know when my passion for physics began. I’ve always been interested in how things work and why they work. I got into theoretical physics in high school, which was really fun. Then for practical reasons, I got a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and what I really learned about myself through going through mechanical engineering school is that I really like learning. I really enjoy learning how things work and the way engineering and physics works, which is trying to describe the way the world works using equations. I just think it is such a cool idea that you can predict what’s going to happen based on variables and taking measurements. So I’ve always had a love of learning and trying to figure out how the world works, and that’s basically physics.”

When was your first exposure to physics and how did it go beyond that point? What did your education and career path look like?

“My first physics class was my junior year in high school. My high school only offered one AP course, which was AP English. I was unable to take an AP Physics course in high school, so I did not take physics my senior year in high school, but I ended up taking a lot of physics in my mechanical engineering to get my mechanical engineering degree.”

Why did you continue to pursue physics beyond when you were introduced to it and why did you choose to become a teacher?

“So I graduated from college, and I got a job working as an engineer, and I did not like it. What I like to tell my students is: I did not get ‘the’ job, which I think if I had gotten the job, I would have stuck with it, and probably would still be doing it, which is [to say,] I did not get a job working for a company called Guidant that made pacemakers, and I would have been designing pacemakers. So for me, personally, [I need to care about] what I do every day, and I really would have enjoyed that, and it would have been a good challenge. I would have felt like I was helping people. But for me, personally, I was working on cars, and I just don’t care about cars. I know there are a lot of people who do, and I think that’s awesome. You need to figure out what it is that you care about and find a way to have a job that has to do with it. So, after just over a year of being an engineer, I was like, “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.” I tried to figure out what else I wanted to do. I had actually been a summer camp counselor for five summers, and I really loved working with kids. I was like, “Well, I guess I could become a high school physics teacher” and [I chose] physics because that was my main interest as far as education was concerned. So I went back and got a master’s degree in education, and I started teaching physics. And it was amazing to start teaching physics because it was eye opening as to how much physics I needed to learn in order to be a good teacher of physics. So yeah. Those first few years, that first decade, was a lot. I’m actually still learning physics. I still delve into each topic very deeply, and I learn things as I do that, which is pretty fun.”

You’ve mentioned how you really enjoyed working with people, so why did you choose to step back from teaching in 2014? 

“In August of 2013, I left to start FlippingPhysics because I felt like I could have a larger impact on more people being a YouTube educator, and then I went back to the classroom in 2015 because I could not support myself financially and my family doing that at the time, it just was not feasible.”

Do you have any other platforms besides YouTube that you teach physics on? 

“Actually, YouTube is not where I started. I started in 2012. I tried to avoid YouTube for quite a while, for almost a year because I disliked all the advertisements and all the commercialization and the algorithm and all that stuff. For a long time, I was only making videos for my own students and was posting them on various websites. But that became not feasible because those videos took up so much space and I could not find any other platform, so YouTube was the only platform in early 2013 that I could really use to share videos. Right now, I make Tiktok videos. I do inside postings on Instagram. I post things on Facebook. I also license my content through Discovery Education and Boclips, and I also have the Ultimate Exam Slayer and Ultimate Review Packet.”

We are really big fans of Billy, Bobby and Bo, especially how they make errors that we make, you let them make errors and you show us how to overcome those errors. My question is, where did those characters come from?

“So this is gonna sound weird, but they came from the fall of 2003 when my eldest child was having surgery. They were born with several birth defects, and they’re doing really well now, but one of them was a spinal surgery. We knew three months in advance when that surgery and I knew I was going to be absent for a couple of days for that surgery. What I decided to do was to film myself teaching so that my students could watch me in class when I was out of class. In the fall of 2003, I actually did flipped learning, but in reverse. I filmed myself as a teacher because I was not going to be there for my students to learn in class. I started trying to figure out how to do it, and I realized I could not stand there and just talk to no one, so I wrote a script and was like, ‘I’m going to have three characters.’ I didn’t have much time, so I went to my closet, and I was like, ‘Okay, what can I do?’ I have a tie so I can wear a tie, so I can be an uptight individual wearing a tie. Then I have tie dyes because that’s pretty much all I wear, so I could be, Bo, as a relaxed individual who wears tie dyes all the time. Then my wife had a Steelers jersey, and I was like I could be some sort of jock individual. It really was just born out of the things that were in my closet, but over the last decade or more, they’ve really taken on their own personalities. I’ve spent a lot of time, believe it or not, thinking about who they are and how they’re going to respond to things, and I try very hard to make it so none of them are the smart one and none of them are the dumb one. That’s an important thing for me because I don’t like categorizing people. No one is dumb, and no one is smart. It’s all about effort, and sometimes we get stuff wrong. That’s the way it is, and you have to learn from that. That’s one of the things I love about my videos I teach. I I designed the videos like the way I teach, which is I ask a lot of questions, and when I ask a student a question and they give me the wrong next step, I continue with that step until we figure out what’s wrong with it…As a student that is such an important thing to learn because you’re going to make mistakes.”

What does the process of making videos look like from the start to finish?

“There’s a lot more than just the filming and the editing. It starts with a basic idea for the video, which right now I’m going through AP Physics two, so I will look at the different benchmarks, and I will figure out what the basic structure is. Like, how can I present this particular topic? For example, right now, I’m talking about electric fields and electric potential difference, so I came up with a diagram and an animation that will show exactly what I’m trying to do. I’ll start with, believe it or not, the animation or the visuals that I’m going to do, then I will write lecture notes for everything. Then I will write out the script. After I’m done with that, I post it on my website, and have a small number of teachers who volunteer, who I might call my quality control team. They look over my scripts, and they will identify mistakes or come up with suggestions, so then I’ll take that and incorporate that, and then I film. Filming, I would estimate [it] takes roughly 5% of the time it takes to make a video. If I do a demonstration, I put that at the very beginning, like demonstration animation would be at the very beginning… What I do is: I have Billy, Bobby and Bo [and] I film all of the characters separately because there’s only one of me…I film all of Billy, then I film all of Bo. And what I do is, you can see I crop Bo’s video, and then I film all of Bobby …What I do with Bobby is I add a mask so you can see that he is filmed separately as well. But when I lay him over the top, I have all three of them together. It’s taken a fair amount of time to get that set up to work … I have to time out how long they’re going to wait and listen to one another. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. For me. I approach all of this as basically a giant puzzle, and I really enjoy putting that puzzle together, all right. I film, I edit, and then after I’m done editing, I upload the finished video again to my quality control team, and they look over for any sort of mistakes or anything. Other than my quality control team that looks over the script and the video when it’s done, I do everything, and I estimate that it takes me roughly two hours per minute of video.”

When you taught school and you made these videos for your students, did you spend the same amount of time editing or did you have the same amount of animation?

“So when I very first started flipping my classroom, all I did was film my lectures in class, and they were terrible for flipped learning because it was just me in front of the class. It was not great. The reason I started making the FlippingPhysics videos is because I went out to the web and tried to find videos that would work, and I just couldn’t find any. So the answer is yes, I started making these for my class, and then other people started to use them, and I just kept making them for my own class, but for other people as well, because [it’s what] I really love doing.”

About your Flipped Classroom idea, our physics teachers also do this. Could you talk a little bit about what a flipped classroom means and why it works, specifically for physics? Did you invent it?

“I did not invent it. I read an article in the fall of 2012 … about the concept of flipped learning. The basic idea behind flipped learning is that the time you need your teacher the least is during the lecture because the lecture is just like presenting information. You can get that information from a textbook. You can get that information from a video. [The lecture] is the least efficient use of class time. When you watch one of my videos, you can pause the video. I estimate that I can present the same amount of information in somewhere between a third and half the time because it’s just a lot more efficient to have a video. I can have closed captions so you can read them. I can create lecture notes so that you can have those as well. The flipped video for learning versus a lecture is a much more logical way to do lectures. Plus those lectures are done at home so that you can then do the things you would normally consider ‘homework’ in school. That’s the whole idea with flipped learning, and it’s just a lot more efficient with students’ time. The time you need the teacher is when you are actually struggling through understanding the stuff, processing the stuff, and having the teacher there to be able to give you gentle nudges and help you understand how the physics works is really much more helpful, but it takes kind of a refiguring of what it means to be a teacher because when you talk about a teacher to most people people, they imagine somebody at the front of the room lecturing, and that’s not what flipped learning is. Flipped learning is the teacher not really up in front of the class very often. Most of the time, they are out in the class, helping [students] with a lab or whatever it is they’re helping [students] with, yeah. So that’s the basic concept of flipped learning. For my last six or seven years of teaching, I taught in an asynchronous, flipped, gainful mastery learning class, which was a lot of fun, but very busy.”

This one is pivoting a little bit away from physics, but we noticed in your “About Us” page that you donate your hair every two and a half years. Could you talk a little bit about why you do it and your journey for this?

“When I was in high school, and I was 16 or 15 years old, I played soccer and I was on the diving team, and in both of those instances, I was not allowed to have long hair for various reasons, which really bothered me. My soccer coach was like, ‘You can’t have long hair for whatever reason.’ I don’t remember. My diving coach was like, ‘You can’t have long hair.’ And so when I was 17 years old, I had an accident while playing soccer such that I ripped off two ligaments in my knee, and I couldn’t play soccer or do any sports like that anymore, and I wore a knee brace. But the one thing … I could do was grow my hair out. So since I was, like, 17 years old, and that happened, I have always had long hair, with one exception. Right before I graduated from college with my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, I cut my hair so that I could get a job. And I’ve realized that that was not a good idea, because I really should never have been hired anywhere that wouldn’t hire me because of who I am, which is all about my hair, which is funny. Okay, so about 15 years ago [or] 20 years ago, I realized there was no reason for me to keep getting haircuts every six months or a year. I could just basically be a hair farm because I don’t really care what length my hair is, and it could actually go to something useful … I don’t even remember how it started, honestly, but I was just like, ‘I should start donating my hair.’ And it was like, 15 or 20 years ago, and yeah, every two and a half years or so, I donate my hair.”

How do you take feedback if, for example, someone spots an error in your video. Has it ever happened?

“Has it ever happened? Of course, it’s happened. Sorry, I’ve had all sorts of errors in the videos because that’s life, right? Like, even after I started having the quality control team, I still have some errors in the video. Actually, I will mention this: I’m sorry — one step in the process that I totally forgot — after I make the video and before my quality control team watches the video, my wife watches every single one of my videos. Sorry, she needs to get credit for that. What’s fun about it is: her background is opera and social work, so she knows absolutely nothing about physics. But she can watch the videos and check for errors. And so, yes, I’ve had errors. If it’s just a minor error, I don’t worry about it. If it’s a physics error … I will, no matter what, fix it and upload a new version. Usually it’s some sort of minor physics error, where I’ve, you know, put something on the screen that’s wrong, but I’ve said the right thing, or something like that. I’ve only had one video throughout the years where I’ve had to completely redo the video, though.” 

You were talking about how your channel is mainly focused on AP physics, but we’ve seen a couple of videos about “How to approach physics problems” or things like that. Is the channel just AP Physics or learning as a whole? How would you describe it?

“I would actually describe it as: it’s about physics as a tool for learning. It just happens to be that because I’m in the United States, and the AP physics curriculum is the primary curriculum for me [for] teaching students in the United States. But, I use physics as a tool to help people learn how to think. That’s always been my main focus as a teacher, to use physics to help you use your brains. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that’s the way I approach everything: slowing down, reading through, understanding what you’re talking about [and] understanding everything before you actually start to solve the questions. With regards to the curriculum, specifically, I actually also have playlists for [Cambridge International] A Level Physics in England, I have playlists for the … All India Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), because there are a lot of students who use my videos from there as well. So AP Physics is just the primary curriculum that I work on, but there are all sorts of other curricula that fit as well.”

How do you curate your videos? Do you feel like you will ever run out of topics to make videos? 

“I get this question a lot, mainly from people who don’t know physics. Like ‘you’ve been [making videos] for 13 years? Aren’t you going to run out of topics?’ The truth is that I have a long list of videos I want to make, and the rate at which I make videos is not fast enough that that list of videos gets longer than [the rate that] I can make the videos, so I don’t anticipate I’ll ever run out of videos I want to make. Like, I would love to make videos that are about astronomy as well. There’s all sorts of things I would love to do.”

What are some examples of physics topics that are currently on your list of video ideas?

“[I’m] currently working through the AP Physics 2 curriculum. I also have gone through all of AP Physics 1, AP Physics C Mechanics and AP Physics C Electricity and Magnetism. There are a few little pockets that are of things that … I really want to do a better job with. Right now, I feel I’ve neglected [AP Physics 2 students] for so many years because I’ve gotten questions about that for a long time, and so I’m glad to start working on that, but it’s probably going to take me three or four years to get through the curriculum and that makes me a little bit sad. I’m focused on those various curricula, honestly, because that’s probably what I need to do in order to call this a real job. If I just start making videos about random physics, it’s not going to be as helpful for my views, but who knows, I’ll probably end up doing that in five or 10 years. We’ll see what happens.”

Is there any advice you would give to physics students that are currently struggling in physics or taking physics and find it hard?

“The truth is that physics, for most people, is hard. You are taking science and math and combining them, and for most students who start taking physics, this is a new concept to them, the idea that math has a purpose, the idea that science can be done with math. I find that there are a fair number of students who struggle, especially at the beginning. I remember with AP Physics C Mechanics, I would have several students who, after that first test, would come to me and be like, I’ve never gotten anything but an A on a test, and I just got a D on this test, so we sit down and have a conversation. What I learned is a lot of students who are struggling in physics have never really learned to study, and they’ve never learned to practice. You need to sit down, and you need to struggle through problems. You need to struggle through labs, and it is through that struggle that you learn. But a lot of students are not used to learning being a struggle, but that’s what learning is. If you already understood all this stuff, you wouldn’t have to learn it. So I’m not sure exactly what my advice is from there, but it’s like, it’s okay that it’s hard, and just keep working at it. It’s going to be okay and watch my videos. They help.”

Is there anything important that you would like to share with students, staff or the community of our school? 

“I recently posted two videos on the idea that I was wrong about a physics concept that I’ve been teaching for two and a half decades. It was interesting, the responses I got from the two videos. One was the basic concept of: ‘I was wrong about something, and here are the consequences of that’ and the other was the physics that I was wrong about. And for a large percentage of people, I got really positive responses like, ‘This is great, thanks for sharing this’ because part of the the idea with the video that was like, ‘I was wrong,’ is: Look, we’re going to be wrong and we’re gonna learn stuff that we’ve been wrong about for 20 years, and we as a society, need to be okay with that. I feel like we are at a point where there are a lot of people who are refusing to learn when they get new information. And I was a little bit saddened that I got feedback from a small number of people. I got one that was like, ‘You didn’t know this for the last 25 years? You’re a terrible teacher. I can’t believe that you consider yourself an educator. You should just leave and do something different.’ I got several comments like that. On my Ultimate Review Packet, I have quizzes and tests that I wrote, and I got some help with, but there’s a spot that you can give feedback, and I got a teacher that responded to one of my questions where I’d gotten something wrong, and they started their feedback with ‘This is wrong.’ I just felt like we can be better than this, right? We run across people making mistakes all the time. I must make mistakes. You guys make mistakes. We need to be better and kinder to one another. That’s kind of it. I’m feeling it more where we are right now. We just need to be open and listen and be kind.”