Calculating Uncertainties

Once a week, for the past 7 months, I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why the creators of the physics lab classes decided that the best way to go about this whole thing is to design activities especially good at draining all the fun right out of physics. Oh. My. God. They should re-name the class "calculating uncertainties" just so you can prepare for what it is you will actually be doing for the next year of your life. Why encourage us to engage in more active observation or make cool discoveries about the laws of the natural world when we could just plug numbers into the same bloody equation over and over and over again? That is where the fun is! 3 hours a week I do this and I feel bad complaining about it because I like physics. I get to actually see how magnets and waves and collision forces act on the real world......for about 10 minutes and then it is back to uncertainties. The funny thing is, no one in my class is on their way to becoming a physicist. We are all in the physics class for people who are not going to do physics. Or math. Or engineering. Or probably anything wherein knowing exactly how wrong you are is going to matter so much. Oy. Four more weeks and it is over.