Alphabet soup

Physics is a difficult subject. It is difficult to learn and difficult to teach. There are almost four thousand members of the American Association of Physics Teachers, and possibly an equal number of teachers who are not members of the Association, whose energy and talent are devoted during part of the day to helping students learn physics for themselves. A teacher can only shorten the time and lighten the burden. In the end a textbook is used, and the student is required to study it to the extent that he can reproduce from memory a fair percentage of the laws and principles of physics, many of which are expressed in mathematical language. It is not necessary at this stage in the development of physics to apologize to a student for using mathematical symbols, but there are times when a teacher feels apologetic for some of the symbols that the student is expected to remember and reproduce.