The marks are fine. That is the confusing part.
Your child sits for the physics test, writes the formulas, answers the questions in the format the teacher expects, and comes home with a score that suggests everything is going well. And then you ask them, casually, over dinner: “So what actually is electricity?”
And the answer that comes back is a definition. Word for word from the textbook. Delivered with the particular flatness of something recited rather than understood.
You push a little further. “But what is it actually doing? Why does the bulb light up?”
And there it is. The pause. The slight uncertainty. The realization, visible on their face before they say a word, that they can reproduce the answer but they cannot inhabit it. They have memorized physics. They have not understood it.
This is not your child’s failure. This is not even the teacher’s failure. This is a structural problem in how physics is taught across India, and it is so widespread that most parents and children have accepted it as normal.
It is not normal. And it is costing your child more than you might realize.
The Gap Between Memorizing Physics and Understanding It
Physics is, at its core, the study of how the physical world
behaves. Forces, energy, motion, electricity, magnetism: these are not abstract ideas invented by scientists to torment students. They are descriptions of things that are happening around your child every single second of every single day.
When a child memorizes Newton’s second law as “F equals MA” without ever feeling what happens when they push a heavy object versus a light one with the same effort, they have a symbol. They do not have a law.
When a child writes down that “electric current flows from higher potential to lower potential” without ever wiring a circuit and feeling what happens when the path is broken, they have a sentence. They do not have understanding.
The formula and the sentence are useful for passing a test. They are useless for thinking. And thinking, specifically the ability to apply a physical principle to a situation it has never been explicitly applied to before, is what every examination above a certain level actually tests. It is what every engineering entrance exam is designed to find. It is what your child’s marks are currently hiding the absence of.
Why Physics Fear Is an Epidemic in Indian Middle Schools
Ask any group of Indian parents whose children are in Grade 6, 7, or 8 which subject produces the most anxiety in their household.
Physics comes up every single time.
Not because Indian children are less capable of understanding physics than children elsewhere. Because Indian children are almost universally taught physics in a way that is specifically designed to produce anxiety rather than understanding.
The method is consistent across schools and cities. A concept is introduced. A formula is derived on the board. Examples are solved. The student practices solving similar examples. A test confirms whether the student can reproduce the pattern.
At no point in this sequence does the student ever encounter the physical reality that the concept describes. At no point do they touch the thing, feel the thing, break the thing, rebuild the thing. At no point does the physics become real.
And when physics is not real, it is threatening. Because unreal things that you are required to perform competence in are inherently anxiety-producing. The child cannot fall back on their experience of the physical world to anchor them because the physical world was never invited into the classroom.
Physics fear is not fear of physics. It is fear of abstraction without anchor. And the cure is not more tuition. The cure is giving the child the anchor.
What Happens When a Child Feels Physics Instead of Reading It
There is a specific moment that STEM educators describe across programs and cities. The moment a child who has been afraid of
physics holds a component that embodies the concept they have been memorizing, and something shifts.
A child who has memorized Ohm’s Law but does not understand resistance holds two wires of different thickness and feels the temperature difference as current flows through them. In that moment, resistance stops being a symbol and becomes a physical reality they have felt with their own hands.
A child who has written “force equals mass times acceleration” without understanding what it means pushes a heavy cart and a light cart with identical effort and watches them move differently. In that moment, the formula stops being arbitrary and becomes a description of something their body already knew.
These are not supplementary learning experiences. They are the learning. Everything else, the formulas, the definitions, the worked examples, are tools for describing what the child now knows from physical experience. The sequence, experience first, then language to describe it, is exactly how human beings have always learned about the physical world. School reversed that sequence and then wondered why children were afraid.
Chitti Future School builds the curriculum around the correct sequence. Every physics concept a child encounters in Chitti’s STEM education program is introduced through a physical experience first. The child builds the circuit before they learn what a circuit is called. They feel the force before they write the formula. They observe the motion before they measure it.
The understanding is built into the hands before the vocabulary arrives to describe it. And that order makes all the difference.
Ajitesh V Kumar, a student at Chitti Future School, knew this gap from the inside. A child who could solve physics problems in
the format his teacher expected and still felt, every time he opened the textbook, that he was navigating a foreign country without a map.
Chitti gave him the map. Not a better textbook. Not clearer explanations. Real components, real challenges, real physics happening under his hands in ways that made every formula he had memorized suddenly make sense.
The All India Math Based Finance Olympiad that he went on to win demanded exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary, first-principles reasoning that emerges when a child genuinely understands how things work rather than how to describe them correctly on paper.
His parents did not see that connection coming when they booked his first free demo class. They just knew the memorisation was not the same as understanding. They were right.
What “Understanding” Physics Actually Looks Like
Here is a practical test any parent can do right now.
Ask your child to explain, in their own words and without opening a book, why a heavier object does not fall faster than a lighter one. Or why a bulb lights up when you close a circuit. Or what friction actually is in terms of what is physically happening between two surfaces.
If the answer is a textbook definition delivered in a flat voice, your child has memorised physics.
If the answer involves hesitation, genuine thinking, an analogy they invented themselves, or a reference to something they have actually experienced, your child has begun to understand physics.
The distance between those two answers is not intelligence. It is not effort. It is the presence or absence of physical experience with the concepts being discussed.
Chitti Future School’s STEM education program, covering robotics for kids, coding for kids, electronics, engineering for kids, and aeromodelling from Grade 1 through Grade 8, is built to close that distance. Not through better explanations of the same abstractions. Through the physical experiences that make abstraction unnecessary.
Your child does not need to memorize better. They need to build something that makes memorization irrelevant.
