Physics

Ninth grade Physics is the opening course in a Physics-first sequence, an approach a growing number of districts have adopted on the argument that physics supplies the mechanical and energy concepts that chemistry and then biology depend on. The course is conceptual or lightly algebra-based, covering motion, forces, energy, momentum, waves and basic electricity.

Because it arrives before students have met trigonometry, the emphasis falls on reasoning from graphs and diagrams rather than manipulating equations — reading a velocity-time graph, drawing a free-body diagram, tracing an energy transfer. Students who build those habits early find the algebra-based course in eleventh grade a matter of adding mathematics to physics they already understand.