My Physics Teacher By David Wagoner Summary

In life situations are often desired and even expected to go as planned, unfortunately that is rarely the case. In the poem “My Physics Teacher” by David Wagoner a student describes all the unlucky and nearly comical predicaments that occur to his physics teacher during his class demonstrations. Wagoner’s use of irony and situational repetition effectively allow him to provide the poem with a theme; All things that could go wrong, will go wrong regardless of an individual’s credentials.
In the first stanza of the poem, Wagoner opens straight into the professor’s demonstration of the properties of gravity. In this first experiment he drops two objects in an attempt to prove that weight is an independent factor to the speed of a falling object.
This is the type of ideology that is expected from a person with a robust education. While having a good education is a positive thing, that very may well be the reason for the teacher’s constant failures. His hard attempts to have everything function flawlessly ultimately backfires on him. “He believed in a world of laws, where problems had answers, where tangible objects and tangible forces acting thereon could be lettered, and numbered, and crammed through our tough skulls for lifetimes of homework” (Wagoner). It is only at the end of his course when the student and his class finally realize a rule of the world that is not taught directly by the teacher’s lectures, but by his unintentional slip-ups. “His only uncontestable demonstration came with our last class: he broke his chalk on a formula, stooped to catch it, knocked his forehead on the eraser gutter, staggered slew foot, and stuck one foot forever into a wastebasket” (Wagoner). This visual sequence of repeated acts of clumsiness and comical mistakes undoubtedly gives reference to Murphy’s Law, an epigram that states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It is ironic that something that is not an actual law of nature, but that is nevertheless still labeled as a law, applies to a physics teacher.
Wagoner’s facetious poem about an educated but awkward teacher who time after time fails to prove the laws