labor is the hidden curriculum

The Rubin Observatory operations team. One name on the building. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

I grew up in South and Central Texas. Mission, then San Antonio, then Austin. I got to this endowed professorship at a public land-grant university in Michigan through public education. Not through grit. Not through some exceptional quality that set me apart from the people I grew up with. Through public money, public schools, and people who did work that made my education possible and never got credit for it.

I still live in both of those worlds. The one I came from and the one I landed in. That distance never closes. I go home to Texas and I’m the professor. I walk into faculty meetings and I’m the kid from South Texas. Neither world fully claims me and I don’t fully belong to either one. What that tension produces, if you sit with it long enough, is a particular way of seeing — especially seeing the stories institutions tell about themselves.

Physics tells a specific story about itself. Knowledge comes from rare individuals. Newton. Galileo. Maxwell. Brilliant minds, working alone, lifting the rest of us onto their shoulders. You’ve heard it. You probably learned it before you learned any actual physics. It is so embedded in how we teach the discipline that it doesn’t feel like a story anymore. It feels like history.

But I grew up around people who worked with their hands and built things. My grandfather taught me to change the oil, to clean guns, to shoot dove, and to barbecue and eat every part of a chicken. Growing up farming in the country with six sisters meant every meal was stretched thin. My grandfather worked on his cars in the driveway and you learned by watching and by handing him a tool when he needed it. The guy next door to my parents ran with a gang. He and his boys spent a whole afternoon teaching me how the electrical system of a car worked while they ran new wire and put in an amplifier, capacitors, new speakers, and a subwoofer. Nobody called it physics. Nobody called it teaching. But it was both. Collective technical knowledge, passed person to person, outside any institution that would have recognized it as knowledge worth having. No one named a telescope after any of them.

And when I got to physics — when I started learning the discipline that would become my life’s work — I kept noticing the same structure. The work of many, credited to few. The labor that makes the science possible, rendered invisible by the story the science tells about itself.

That is not history. That is a choice.

And it’s worth asking what that choice costs…not just historically, but right now, in our classrooms, for the students sitting in front of us.

resilience as resource, not obstacle

The cost is visible the moment students walk into a physics classroom.

Physics culture has a word for students who struggle and keep going anyway. Grit. It gets deployed as a compliment — you have what it takes, you’re resilient, you’ll make it. I have certainly heard the word applied to me.

But grit is an individualized story about persistence. It locates the resource inside the student and makes their survival the evidence of their worthiness. If you make it through, you had grit. If you don’t, you didn’t. The discipline never has to ask what it cost you, or whether the structure itself was the problem.

That’s not the kind of resilience I grew up around.

My grandfather didn’t fix engines alone. He worked in the garage next to my dad. And when he got stuck, he would talk to his mechanic, fix what he could and pay for the rest. My neighbor didn’t put in that subwoofer alone. He was with some of the guys that he was with months later when he was shot in the back fleeing a fight. The knowledge that circulated in those driveways and those afternoons was collective — held between people, passed through demonstration and practice and showing up when someone needed an extra pair of hands. Nobody was proving themselves to an institution. Nobody was performing capability for an audience. They were just doing the work, together, because the work needed doing and you didn’t leave someone to figure it out alone.

That is a different theory of resilience. Not the capacity to persist through difficulty as an individual. The knowledge that difficulty is shared, that the work is bigger than any one person, and that showing up for the people around you is both the method and the point. Working-class culture builds that knowledge into people early and builds it deep. It is not a deficit. It is not something students need to overcome or leave behind to succeed in physics. It is a resource — one that physics culture is almost perfectly designed not to see.

Here’s what physics culture sees instead: the wrong kind of social orientation. Students who want to work together when they should be working independently. Students who ask for help too early, or too openly, or from the wrong people. Students who seem more concerned with the people around them than with their own advancement. The hidden message is consistent: belonging here is something you earn alone, and you earn it by demonstrating that you don’t need anyone.

That message is not neutral. It is a class message. It describes a middle-class theory of achievement (individual, credentialed, deferred) and presents it as the natural culture of a rigorous discipline. Students who arrive already shaped by collective work read that message clearly, even when no one says it out loud. Many of them conclude, reasonably, that they are in the wrong room.

They are not in the wrong room. Their instincts are correct. Physics at scale — the actual practice of the discipline, the large collaborations, the shared instrumentation, the collective authorship on papers with a thousand names — is built on exactly the kind of collective work those students already know how to do. The lone genius narrative is not just historically false. It is a misdescription of contemporary physics that actively costs us the students who already understand how real scientific work functions even if they haven’t had the chance to participate in it.

The question is what to do about it inside a classroom.

belonging first — what i actually do

The first day of class I tell students they belong here. Not as a motivational statement. As a structural one. The assignments are organized the way they are because I mean it. Exercise 0 is there from the first week because I mean it. The course is built on the assumption that you are already someone who can do this work — not someone who might eventually become that person if you prove yourself sufficiently.

That’s a different starting position than most physics courses take. Most physics courses operate on a becoming logic: you are working toward membership in a community that currently excludes you. Belonging is deferred. It is the reward for surviving the filter. I am trying to build something where belonging is the condition, not the prize.

On Fridays we have a workshop day. I work through one problem with the whole class — stopping, letting students work through the hard parts, talking through what’s stuck. Then my learning assistant and I move through the room while groups work. The physics in this course is genuinely collective: pencil-and-paper problems and computational work in Python that students do together in groups of up to three, turning in one set of answers. The individual work and the only thing students do alone is Exercise 0 — the writing that asks them to examine the labor physics hides from its own history. The collective work is the physics itself. That is not an accident.

The room on Fridays looks like a garage. People are stuck, asking questions, figuring things out next to each other. At some point during the semester they are writing code to numerically integrate equations of motion — using the Euler-Cromer method. The course notes tell them that method was independently discovered by a high school student named Abby Aspel in 1980 — before the man whose name it carries published it. That is a small thing and also not a small thing. Students are doing collective technical work, in a room designed for collective technical work, using a tool built by someone whose name physics forgot.

Exercise 0 runs alongside all of this as the intellectual layer. Every two weeks, woven through the homework sequence, students write short reflections — 150 words at a time — on questions the physics curriculum almost never asks. Whose labor built the foundations of classical mechanics? Who gets credit for scientific discovery and why? What does it mean that an AI trained on publicly funded databases won a Nobel Prize for its corporate owners? Whose land does the telescope sit on? These are not decorative questions. They are the same question the course structure is already asking, made explicit: who does the work, who gets credit, and who decides?

By the end of the semester students have built something real — a computational essay, a model of a physical system of their own choosing, code that runs, a story of what they found — and thought carefully about what building something real actually involves. Those two things are not separate. The computational essay and Exercise 0 are the same argument made in two registers: one through doing, one through thinking about doing.

some anticipated objections

Someone will point out that I am a physics education researcher and that I should be doing something more systematic. Using validated tutorials. Measuring learning gains. Following an established research-based curriculum.

I use clickers. But my clicker questions sometimes have no correct answer. Sometimes multiple correct answers. Sometimes I write the question on my tablet in the moment because something just happened in the room that is more interesting than what I had planned. That is not sloppy teaching. That is teaching that treats the room as a live situation rather than a protocol to execute. The knowledge of how to do that — how to read what’s happening and respond to it, how to follow a conversation somewhere useful — I did not learn that from reading active learning literature. I learned it from doing. From failing. I learned it in the same places I learned everything else. You watch. You pay attention. You hand someone a tool when they need it. You make it your own.

There is also the rigor argument. Students need to know how they’re doing. They need to earn what they get. Physics is hard and not everyone can do it.

I agree with some of that sentiment. Feedback matters. Hard problems matter. I give both. The midterms in this course extend into territory students haven’t seen. There is no worked example to copy. The problems are genuinely difficult and students are genuinely expected to figure things out they don’t already know how to do.

What I don’t agree with is the assumption that the way physics currently measures rigor is neutral. Timed individual exams taken alone reward students who already know how to perform under those conditions, which is a skill that has very little to do with physics and a great deal to do with what kind of schooling you had before you got here. The students who struggle most with that format are often the same students who are doing the most sophisticated thinking in the room on Fridays. The format can’t see them. That is not their problem.

Rigor is real. The question is what we’re actually measuring when we think we’re measuring it.

A colleague in physics education research will recognize what I’m describing and say I’m attacking communities of practice — the idea that learning physics means becoming a member of a physics community, moving from the periphery toward full participation. And they’re right that I’m questioning it. Not because the framework is wrong about everything. It describes something real about how expertise develops and how culture is transmitted. But it takes the community as given. It asks how you get in. It doesn’t ask whether getting in requires you to leave too much of yourself at the door, or whether the community’s values are worth the cost of admission, or who decided what full participation looks like in the first place.

I used to find that framework useful. I find it insufficient now. Not wrong, just insufficient. It describes the current physics community accurately enough. What it can’t do is imagine a different one.

I’m not sure I have a cleaner theory to replace it with. What I have is a classroom and a set of choices and fifteen years of watching what happens when you build something on different assumptions. I’m still working out what to call it. But I know what it feels like from inside the room on Fridays, and that’s where I started.

where this comes from

I am not a labor historian. I am not a working-class studies scholar. I am a physics education researcher who grew up in South Texas and has spent twenty five years noticing that the discipline I love keeps telling most of the people who enter it that they don’t quite fit yet.

That biography shapes what I see and what I don’t see. I came up through PER. I have read the literature on identity and belonging; I don’t practice that research. I have published in the journals and attended the conferences and participated in the communities I am now questioning. That is a particular vantage point with particular blind spots. I am not outside the institution looking in — I am inside it, with an endowed professorship at a land-grant university, trying to see it clearly from a position it has already rewarded me for occupying. I have the privilege to question these frameworks and practices. That tension is real and I don’t think it resolves.

I am also a Latino man and first generation college student, which means race and class are braided together in my experience in ways I cannot fully separate and have not fully worked out theoretically. When I talk about working-class values I am also talking about my family’s specific culture, which is Mexican American and South Texan and shaped by land and labor in ways that are not universal to working-class experience. I am not speaking for a class. I am speaking from a specific place within it.

The classroom I’m trying to build runs on values I learned before I learned any physics. That the work is bigger than any one person. That you don’t leave someone to figure it out alone. I learned those things in driveways and kitchens, not in a physics classroom. Whether those values constitute a coherent pedagogy or a theory or just a set of choices that happen to work in my room — I genuinely don’t know yet. I’m still inside it.

I still live in both worlds. That tension doesn’t resolve. But it produces something: a particular way of seeing what physics culture looks like from outside the story it tells about itself, and a willingness to say so even when I’m not sure I have the framework right.

the invitation

The curriculum is public. The assignments are open. If something here is useful, take it. I’m still figuring out what works. But the students in my classroom on Fridays — working through hard problems together, writing code, arguing about models — they are not there despite where they came from. The knowledge of how to show up and work alongside other people did not begin in a physics classroom. It began in driveways and kitchens and on land that had to feed a family. Physics has always depended on that knowledge. It just hasn’t said so.