If the Marx Brothers taught a physics class, it would probably look a lot like Physics Phor Parents, a Prospect High School course that is now so popular a lottery determines who gets in.
Physics teachers Keith Bellof, Bruce Illingworth and Mark Welter have taught the class once a year for the past six years at the Mt. Prospect school. They do it to meet parents, raise the esprit de corps of the math and science department, and get parents more involved.
During a recent class on optics, the teachers rushed around the room working gadgets for their demonstrations and peppered their lecture with one-liners and humorous anecdotes.
The parents’ lessons are “the fun stuff,” Welter said. “Math is kept at nothing, with demonstrations at a maximum.”
For example, a red laser beam was used to show how light can be trapped in certain materials, a phenomenon called “total internal reflection” that makes fiber optics possible.
Mirrors and eye charts were used to show how an object’s reflection in a flat mirror is a dramatic distortion of the actual distance separating mirror and object. So the teachers demonstrated that a 6-foot-tall person would need a mirror at least 3-feet-tall to catch the entire head-to-toe reflection.
Jim McIlwee and his wife, whose daughter takes physics, enrolled in the set of three classes this semester. “I was intrigued, really curious,” he said. “The teachers here seem to have a cultlike following.”
The extra-credit assignment was for parents and kids to look at the moon, then bend over and look at it again from between their legs. By doing so the moon would appear absurdly small, Illingworth said. “I suggest this be done in the privacy of your back yard,” he added.
The point of the experiment was to show that the moon is always the same size and the atmosphere does not magnify the moon’s image, as some may suppose. That the moon appears to be different sizes is an optical illusion that occurs when seen near an object of comprehensible size, such as a tree or house.
The other classes in the series explore Newtonian law and the properties of sound.
“I nearly died in physics class when I was in high school,” said Barb Fryzel, an English teacher at Prospect whose son, Wally, is a physics student. “I don’t do numbers and angles, but I think these guys make the subject matter come alive.”
