Just because I teach students in a classroom in metro Atlanta doesn’t mean I can’t also provide a service to students worldwide. The following comment warmed my heart when it showed up on CEA Physics, the classroom blog I run:

I have no idea who you are, but i am in eighth grade in Texas and i am studying what you are studying and i have a big test i need to study for, but i lost my notes your website helped a lot. Thanks

That blog is a year old this week, so it’s cool that this comment came in at this time. While this is the first comment I’ve gotten from someone outside our class community, it’s not the first time an outsider has visited the blog. I follow the logs to see what kind of search queries land people at my front door. Plenty of them include the phrase “study guide” or “practice problems”. My guess is that students looking for material before a test hit up Google.

Regular readers from my classroom are expected. Readers from the outside are nice surprises. For my own blog improvement, two questions come to mind: how can I change the blog so an independent learner could take the course on their own? and How can I better engage these visitors? I’m glad it’s spring break now so that I can mull on these!

Oh, and by the way: If you wound up on this post because you Googled “physics study guide” and you don’t care a whit about teaching, here are my favorite physics resources on the web: