How I became a physics teacher

Here is how it started. Back in the 1990s, Mary Long and I met through Sunday school class. Mary was the director at the Science Academy magnet high school in Austin, Texas. I was working as an engineer for Motorola nearby. She asked me to lead some electronics seminars for their robotics classes and I agreed.

I put together a two-day class on semiconductor logic. We started out with NAND gates and diodes and used small breadboards to make simple logic circuits, building up to a flip-flop, a circuit that has two stable states. The second day we used JK flip-flops and built counters and other, similar things. The class was great fun for me and, I hope, for the kids. I decided that when I retired in a few years I would teach high school physics.

A few years later, Mary left the Science Academy and, along with University of Texas at Austin physics faculty member Michael Marder and others, started the UTeach program in the college of natural sciences at UT. I learned from her that science and math students take one UTeach class per semester starting with their freshman year; after filling those requirements, they complete their student teaching and receive their teacher certification. I was therefore able to take one class per semester while still working at Motorola. I live near UT, and I could schedule classes either early or late in the day to minimize driving. The time was right for me to begin my training.

I thoroughly enjoyed being back on campus after so many years of working. I also valued the fact that UTeach puts its students in real classrooms right away, to help us determine whether teaching is the right career path. For an early lesson, I partnered with a classmate to teach a fifth-grade science class. We compared the temperature rise in three large jars that were illuminated by a light bulb. We covered the first jar, and left the second and third open; into the third, we poured carbon dioxide that we made from baking soda and vinegar. The results were dramatic: the temperature rise in the CO₂ jar was nearly as high as in the covered jar.

I also taught classes in middle school and high school. In one, we built reflecting telescopes out of seven-inch construction tubes. My fellow students and I completed most of the construction at UT, and then took the partially-finished telescopes to a local high school. The students’ assignment was to calculate the focal length of the mirror and add the eyepiece to finish the telescope.

It was an all-day project, with teams of UTeach students teaching different parts of the lesson. My part came at the end of the day when the telescopes were finished; three pairs of UT students worked with several teams of high school students to ensure that the completed telescopes worked well. After the lesson, as we were packing up to leave, the students started coming back in with their friends to show off their telescopes. It was an amazing experience. Best of all, we gifted the completed telescopes to the high school science department.

After five semesters, Motorola offered me early retirement, and I was able to quickly complete my coursework and student teaching. I am now in my seventh year of teaching at Travis High School in Austin. I teach Pre-AP and AP physics classes, including AP Physics B and AP Physics C. I am proud to have a growing number of students passing their AP exams.

Travis is a Title I school with a low-income, predominantly Hispanic population. We are following UTeach co-founder Marder’s model for generating more science, engineering and math majors for Texas universities. Marder feels that the low-income, inner-city high schools offer the best opportunity for more STEM majors. In affluent suburban schools, students are essentially programmed for their majors by the time they get to high school. By contrast, many of the inner-city students have no idea what an engineer is, and their talents are often underutilized.

The science and math departments at Travis have approximately half a dozen UTeach graduates. I am amazed at the talent and enthusiasm of these young folks who could be commanding high salaries in industry, but instead have chosen to help change the lives of our students.

We can see their collective success in the number of recent Travis graduates enrolled in engineering, math, and science programs in Texas universities, and a few in out-of-state colleges, including Stanford University, Olin College, Syracuse University, and MIT.

Curtis Wyman is a physics teacher at Travis High School in Austin, Texas.