I understood only a fraction of it, naturally, but remember, these were the days before Toy Story, and you couldn’t ask for better animation!

It’s hard to believe that happened in kindergarten, but that’s the only chronologically consistent possibility, because I know it was in first grade that during alphabet lessons I befuddled the teacher by asserting that

[tex] F = ma. [/tex]

She looked it up in her husband’s engineering textbook that night, and then she had an interesting story to tell in the teachers’ lounge.

Another classic from those days was Timothy Ferris’ Creation of the Universe. You know, I think watching those shows as many times as I did when I was that young crosses the line from science nerdity into outright weirdness. . . .

I’m sorry to hear that physics enrollment at your school is dropping. I took a whole bunch of AP classes in high school (and I bluffed my way through the exams of a couple classes I didn’t take), and at the time, it seemed to me that “teaching to the test” really impaired the education we got. What’s the good of getting all the motivated youngsters together when all you can teach them is the material which can be pressure-molded into multiple-choice questions? I can only imagine what damage that sort of obsession might do when inflicted upon all the classes.