Abstract:

Teaching high school pupils and teaching college students might appear very similar but in fact it is quite a different experience. For twenty odd years the author of this paper served as a college professor teaching electrical engineering to undergraduate students (he still does), groups of students mostly over 20 years of age that are willing to pay good money to become engineers. Two years ago, the author decided to obtain a teaching certificate allowing him to teach high school physics (this diploma is not required for college or university teaching). He did so because he thought he will learn new methods that will help him teach un college. But the bug of school teaching caught him and in 2023, alongside the college teaching he began teaching 10th grade pupils on optics and Kinematics and 9th grade pupils on intro-duction to Kinematics. The circumstances have led him to teach some of the classes via Zoom and some in frontal lessons and he found out that teaching teenagers is quite different from teaching adults. In this paper the author compares his two teaching experiences in terms of syllabus, grading methods, teaching methods, the importance of attendance and receiving feedback from students and pupils. By emphasizing the resemblance and the differences between the two worlds the authors hopes other members of the teaching community may take advantage to improve their teaching abilities.

Keywords:

Engineering Education, Physics Teaching, Long Life Learning, Social and Emotional Learning.