What if the way we’ve always taught physics is the problem?
For more than three decades, Robin Christine DeMarco taught physics in American classrooms and online. She handed out textbooks. She wrote equations on the board. She watched students scramble to find the formula that fit the variables — and call that understanding.
And she knew, the whole time, that something was off.
Not with the students. Never with the students.
The system teaches students to perform physics. Write down what’s given. Identify what you need. Hunt for the equation. Plug in the numbers. Move on.
What the system doesn’t teach — what it barely makes time for — is the part that matters. Why is this happening? What does it mean? How would I figure this out if the textbook wasn’t right in front of me?
Those questions are physics. Everything else is arithmetic.
The moment that changed things didn’t happen at a whiteboard.
It happened on the Genesee River.
Robin’s students were on the water — rafting through rapids, tracking forces, feeling Newton’s laws in their shoulders and their core before they ever put numbers to them. Not a simulation. Not a worksheet. The actual river.
That lab earned Robin (and her collaborators) the Cable in the Classroom Crystal Apple Award — a national recognition for innovative teaching. But more than any award, it confirmed what she’d always believed: when students are in the experience first, the understanding follows.
You can’t teach physics from behind a desk. You have to bring it home.
“Physics is not about memorizing formulas. It’s about learning to observe carefully, ask good questions, think critically, and make sense of a world that doesn’t always provide obvious answers.”
The Physics Thinking Method
Everything Centripetal Education teaches is built on four steps:
Observe. What is actually happening here? Before you name it, before you measure it — what do you see? Most students are never asked this question. We ask it every time.
Discuss. What could explain it? What doesn’t fit? What questions does this raise? This is the step most textbooks skip entirely — and the step where real scientific thinking begins.
Investigate. Now you test it. Now you measure. Now you find out whether your thinking holds up.
Understand. This is where we go over our work and begin to see the relationships that make the universe work.
This is how physicists work in real labs, on real research teams, solving problems that don’t come with answer keys. It’s also how students stop hunting for formulas — and start actually understanding physics.
When Robin stepped back from the traditional classroom, she didn’t stop teaching.
She started asking different questions.
What would physics education look like without the constraint of a standardized test? What could students accomplish if they were taught to think, not to memorize? What would it mean to hand a student a real problem — no textbook, no formula sheet — and watch them figure it out?
Centripetal Education is the answer to those questions.
Built for students starting their first physics course. Built for homeschool families who want something more than a textbook and a hope. Built on the belief that any student — any student — can learn to think like a physicist.
Not because they’re talented. Because they were taught.
A little background, if you need it.
Robin holds degrees in physics and education and spent more than three decades teaching at the secondary level. She’s worked with students who “hate science,” students with math anxiety, students who were absolutely certain physics wasn’t for them — and she’s watched every single one of them have a moment where it clicked.
The Crystal Apple Award sits on a shelf somewhere. The river lab is in her permanent lesson plans.
Ready to see what physics looks like when it’s taught differently?
→ Enroll in the Physics Readiness Bootcamp Five days before the first day of class that will change the first day of class. August 3–7, 2026 | Early Bird: $197 through July 20
→ Take the Free Quiz Find out how your student already thinks — and what to build on before September.