The first day of high school is usually filled with icebreakers, like the classic, two truths and a lie. Two truths and one lie I often share with my class are:
- I am a physics teacher
- I hate science
- I love dogs
The lie, unfortunately, is that I love dogs — they’re fine; I’m just not a pet person. In this case, I really am a physics teacher who, at one point, hated science; in fact, I spent the better part of the past decade trying to escape it. But let me clarify that I don’t feel that way anymore.
Although I was never bad at science, it wasn’t interesting or meaningful to me, and I just never saw myself in it. I never considered this might be the root of my disinterest; I just unconsciously absorbed that science was figured out centuries ago by old, white men who did not look or think like me.
Regardless of my feelings toward it, when I was in college, my parents pushed me into engineering with the promise that it would lead to a steady income and a competitive salary. Needless to say, I struggled to keep up with the coursework, and I began to hate it. Not only was I unprepared for the levels of math and study skills required, but as a bleeding-heart, 17-year-old, I wanted to do something to help my community.
Soon after, I fell in love with education by volunteering to teach English as a Second Language outside my classes. Upon graduating, I tried to pivot from science and develop some real-world career experience by working in consulting, but I eventually decided to pursue teaching full-time. Due to my background in engineering, I was selected for a physics teaching credential program instead of my first choice of English.
Ironically, it has been through my teaching experience that I have finally come to see the way science drives our daily lives. If I had learned in high school what a motor and a generator were, and seen that they are simply wires around magnets, I think I might have chosen to continue in engineering and spent more time loving science instead of hating it. Not to mention, my experience struggling to like science gives me a unique insight into a parallel problem that I am observing among the students in my classroom.
Many of my students have a deep sense of curiosity, a wealth of creativity and an awareness of the world that I lacked when I was in school. These attributes make them ideal candidates to thrive in science, but the curriculum requires a level of math and reading that makes the science itself hard to grasp. This led me to wonder: What’s so fun about science? Why should my students care about it? And what would make them care enough to see themselves as scientists one day?
The Magical World of Science
I should point out that I’m not the only one asking these questions. Many educators, like Stanford University Professor Bryan Brown, have long advocated for a shift in the national approach to teaching science and have worked to develop curricular content to further those goals.
In the meantime, science teachers like myself are largely left to modify and present the standards independently as schools cycle through textbooks and curriculums. For example, one performance expectation in our district’s Next Generation Science Standards-aligned curriculum reads:
Students who demonstrate understanding can evaluate the validity and reliability of claims in published materials of the effects that different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation have when absorbed by matter.
During my first year of teaching, I realized that these standards relied on algebra and reading skills that were still out of reach for most of my class. Seeing my students’ bewilderment and frustration, I began to reflect on my time in college when I lacked the math competencies and background vocabulary to grasp the material. So, I learned to adapt my expectations for what teaching high school science actually means.
One day, during class, I posed a question to my student on a topic everyone was familiar with: cell phones. Specifically, I asked, “Can cell phones cause cancer?”
In our initial poll, the classes were all fairly split. Most, but not all of them, had heard of the claim that their cell phones might cause cancer. About half of them believed it, and the other half weren’t sure, so we launched an investigative unit to understand how cell phones use microwave and radio frequencies to communicate.
We learned about ionizing versus non-ionizing radiation and practiced evaluating internet sources for credibility. This culminated in a written claim, evidence, and reasoning letter explaining their conclusions to a family member. I loved the enthusiastic discussion and hilarious, brilliant letters this unit generated, but I was nervous about teaching the next unit: electricity and magnetism.
Electricity had always been my weak point when I studied physics, and I could never understand things happening at a scale too small and a speed too fast to see. After much research, I had the models of atoms, vocabulary worksheets and circuit diagrams prepared, but I had no way to make this interesting to my students. Rummaging around our ancient and cluttered science supply closet, I dug up a dusty box labeled ‘fun fly stick’ that functioned like a miniature Van-de-Graff generator.
I started with a demonstration. Then, I let the kids take turns with the wand that seemed to magically transform a flat sheet of mylar into a floating, glittering, 3-D-patterned orb. I watched their excitement as they propelled it through the air, only to touch it and have it collapse back into a flat sheet.
After the demo, we worked together — through a week of brainstorming, models, labs, and notes — to figure out that the magic behind this trick is just electrons. While too tiny for us to see individually, we can still observe their effects and come to understand that it is their movement through wires and magnets that drives so much of our daily lives. I focused on making this apparent to my students as we built a speaker, turned a nail into an electromagnet and used a hand-crank electromagnetic generator to power light bulbs.
Although I included the math and vocabulary, I was more interested in their ability to explain the big idea. To finish the unit, we studied the local electric grid and analyzed the utility bills of a typical apartment in our community, which the kids weirdly, yet passionately loved.
It was during this demo that I really started to love science — when I realized a science teacher could be sort of the inverse of a magician. Through this experience, I worked to convince my students that science is not only something that explains the natural world around us, but something that continues to affect how we live, work, communicate, play and exist.
Exit Ticket
Nearly a decade after my own high school and college experiences, feeling unenthused and unmoved by the prospect of a career in STEM, I’ve come to believe it is vital that my students learn the real-world meaning of science and see themselves as future scientists.
Nowadays, I openly share with my students how I used to hate science and why I love it now. They know my focus is more on them learning how to think and work like scientists than on memorizing formulas. Instead, I lean into questions about climate change, microplastics, PFAs, artificial intelligence and the future of the Earth and space exploration, topics that will undoubtedly be important for students to understand and have knowledge about long after they leave my classroom.
For me, the goal of high school science is for students to leave my class with the curiosity to ask questions about the world around them, the perseverance and resourcefulness to figure out the answer, and the confidence they can contribute to shaping the world they inherit. If teachers and caretakers can point to the relevance of science in the world around them, I’m hopeful we can make progress for more inclusive and representative decision-makers and researchers.
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