Putting Physics First

An award-winning Idaho teacher explains why students should start their high school education with physics.

Story and photos by Denise Jarrett Weeks

BOISE, Idaho—The first place Larry Neznanski ever held class was underneath Lake Superior in the 1960s. He was in a copper mine, with the lake bed hundreds of feet above, when he found himself sharing a lunch hour with a group of seasoned electricians. They worked for the White Pine Copper Company, a massive mining and smelting operation that included its own power plant.

The industrial compound was beautiful to Neznanski's eyes. He'd just finished the undergraduate program at Michigan Technological University in electrical engineering and would be heading to graduate school at Purdue University at the end of the summer. Until then, White Pine had given him a summer job.

He remembers that day when a bunch of electricians stood around eating and began asking him questions. They were interested in this budding engineer, a kid really, and they struck up a conversation with him, asking about the science behind the electricity that they worked with every day.

"Guys were always asking about transistors and things, and they'd say, 'Well, we know how to use this stuff, but we don't know how it works.' So I thought, 'Well, I know how it works.' So I took out some of my texts and started putting stuff together. I'd go down there and these guys would be eating sandwiches, and I'd have my little board and I'd start teaching solid state physics. They loved it. So I did it for a whole summer."

From briefing room to classroom

After that summer, Neznanski went on to earn a master's then a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Purdue and followed that with a high-flying military career in Cold War technology. It was thrilling and demanding, the life of a suitcase jock who researched, designed, built, and monitored satellite and missile systems for the United States Air Force. But 25 years after teaching those electricians in the mine, Neznanski found himself once again using his lunch hour to teach in an unlikely place: the physics lab at Boise's Bishop Kelly High School, Idaho's only Catholic high school.

It was 1990, and it seemed he'd stepped directly from the briefing room to the classroom. Still in his 40s, Neznanski had retired that spring as an Air Force lieutenant colonel, just as the Cold War was ending. By fall, he and his family had moved from Los Angeles to Boise and he was teaching physics and math, and coaching football at Bishop Kelly, or BK as it's known here.

That year, the Idaho legislature had passed a law providing an alternate route to teacher certification for industry professionals who wanted to go into teaching. Neznanski was the first to go through the program and BK snapped up his application, willing to take a risk that this military man would be a good addition to the faculty. Neznanski launched into his second career, calling himself a "retread" and soaking up all that he could from his teaching mentor, Henry Krewer, a much-loved chemistry and physics teacher at BK.

When Krewer retired, Neznanski inherited the physics lab. In short order, his lunchtime lessons began. The room would be empty at that time of day but for a clutch of inquisitive students and "Doc Nez," as the students had dubbed him. They'd be huddled at the blackboard or around one of the tables, talking about optics or thermal dynamics, or probing the incongruities of electromagnetism—things not normally covered in such depth in the regular physics course. Neznanski sensed that these kids, many not necessarily academic stars, could go much farther than the basics. So, he made an open invitation: Any student who wanted to plumb the deeper mysteries of how the world works could come to Room 17 at the lunch hour.

Physics first

Today, 15 years later, Neznanski teaches physics from first to last bell. He no longer teaches math or coaches football. Instead, in addition to teaching regular physics, he parlayed that lunchtime class, which he led for four years, into a two-year Advanced Placement physics course. And he persuaded his science colleagues—not to mention the BK administration—that conceptual physics needed to be taught to freshmen, before they study chemistry and biology. So, Neznanski—who was named a Micron Outstanding Science Teacher in 2003 and was selected the American Physical Society Distinguished Physics Teacher from Idaho in 1999—now teaches three levels of high school physics, and the number of physics students has gone from 14 to 125.

Creating the conceptual physics course for ninth-graders was a radical change to the curriculum. (Freshmen are now required to take either conceptual physics or earth science.) Neznanski was midway through the school year in 1993-1994 when he got the idea, and by fall he was teaching it. Credit the lightning-speed progress to willing colleagues, a private school's relative freedom to make curricular changes, and to one Paul G. Hewitt, says Neznanski.

Paul G. Hewitt is a retired physics professor whose widely used textbook Conceptual Physics promotes teaching physics to all students—not just to the top achievers—and teaching it earlier. Hewitt's views validated something Neznanski knew to be true from his own experience but that is still under-recognized in education: An understanding of basic physics ideas should form the foundation for studying chemistry and biology. In fact, some say the traditional sequence of teaching first biology, then chemistry, then physics has it backward.

It's long been believed that students need advanced algebra and calculus skills to do physics, but Hewitt, as well as such prominent physicists as Leon M. Lederman—a Nobel laureate who supports the "physics first" movement—believes that the basic laws of nature can be learned with minimal mathematical foundation.

As Hewitt tells students in the opening pages of his textbook, "Physics is about the rules of nature—so beautifully elegant that it can be neatly described mathematically. That's why many physics courses are treated as applied mathematics. But introductory physics that emphasizes computation misses something essential—comprehension—a gut feeling for the concepts."

Neznanski puts it this way: "It makes little sense to teach biology, chemistry, and then physics. Biology is the most complex of the sciences; it's the study of life. And we are chemical-based life forms, so you want students to understand physics and chemistry before studying biology.

"Chemistry is essentially the study of chemical bonding, but the forces and the atomic stuff behind that is pure physics. If you understand forces, it's easier to understand why particular atoms or molecules will bond the way they do... If you understand vectors then you understand something about forces and that they have directions, and that will help you understand chemistry."

Guy Hudson teaches chemistry at BK. Before going back to college to earn a teaching degree, he worked as a scientist with Micron Technology in Boise. He says, "What I notice is that the kids who have taken Nez's class in conceptual physics, and have done reasonably well in there, are more prepared for my class because they're used to a little more critical thinking. They can relate several concepts and put them together, which is really the crux of chemistry. It's a really good prep course for those kids."

Taking physics before and concurrently with courses in algebra, precalculus, and calculus creates a wonderful synergy between the science and the math, says calculus teacher Wendy Dalrymple. As part of her graduate work in mathematics, she took several courses in physics, and she and Neznanski feel particularly in synch, regularly reinforcing the concepts each is teaching in their classrooms.

"The kids that have had conceptual physics and then go on to take further physics and are taking the math that goes with that... seem to have a bigger curiosity about how math works. Not to just find the number answer, but why something occurs," she says. "Especially in calculus, if I can do a physics problem and show them a method to find a number answer, and then show them the math, then we get to meld our disciplines together, and that's what works. Absolutely, it makes you a better math student to practice and have applications."

Physics for all

Not only are the kids who are taking physics at BK these days more diverse in their academic abilities, but also in gender. There are more girls participating than ever before. Forty-five percent of this year's entire freshmen class has elected to take Neznanski's conceptual physics course. Fifty percent of them are girls. While this is significant progress in getting more girls into this boy-dominated subject, girls' participation dips as the courses get more advanced. In regular physics, 30 percent of the students are girls, and in AP physics, that number drops to about 20 percent. Neznanski has observed that girls are often more interested in pursuing advanced biology than physics, but he can point to more than a few who have pursued physics and even gone on to study engineering in college.

And both boys and girls can be enthusiastic advocates for physics, and they struggle and triumph equally.

"I really don't like math and science usually," says Lilly, a freshman. "It's really not my thing. But physics is not so much a science and a math as a way of understanding... what happens [in everyday life]. So I think it's really interesting because it can be applied to almost anything. I can take this and make it more advanced into chemistry and biology and all those other more complex sciences. Physics is, I think, a really good basic building block."

Roland is also a freshman this year. He doesn't consider himself a "science whiz" like his older brother, so he was surprised to find just how much fun physics could be in Doc Nez's class. "When I came here I just got the crap kicked out of me. I mean, I did horrible at first, but once Doc kind of started to explain it, it got a lot easier. I like it a lot. I think it's really fun. He makes it so that something you see everyday, he compares it to that. Like we're doing atoms right now [and] he's kind of comparing it to planets and stuff like that. So it makes it a lot easier."

One thing's for sure, these students are beginning to see their world very differently.

"Everything else in life used to be simple!" says freshman Laura. "Everything's more complicated now because he just makes me think more."

Peter, an upperclassman, agrees, and tells an anecdote that sends him and his classmates into fits of laughter: "Rachel and I went to see the Nutcracker and for the first half of the ballet they were doing their dances, and I was thinking, 'OK, the center of mass is over their footprint. Their dresses are coming up because of differences in pressure—Bernoulli's Principle.' She leans over and says, 'Hey Peter, look: rotational inertia.' 'Yep, I been thinking of that the entire play!' Three years of physics ruins ballet, watch out!"

Science Olympiad

By turning the "regular kid" on to physics, Neznanski has helped to generate a lot of excitement about science in this school of some 600 students. About 45 students compete every year in the Science Olympiad, and five teachers and some steadfast parents devote considerable time coaching and traveling with them to competitions. Neznanski started the program at BK 11 years ago, and BK students have won the state competition nearly every year. When they make it to the national competition, they are frequent medalists and they were awarded the Spirit Trophy in 2002. Last year, the BK team brought home four national medals.

While some schools that participate in Science Olympiad recruit only the kids with high SAT scores, he says, "they're missing the kid in the middle, and they're the ones who need it the most. What I was looking for was something that an average kid could do that would turn them on to science. I'm not looking for your top students only. I don't care if a student is a hellion or has D's. I just want someone who's interested. They may not get A's, but they won't quit once they see they belong somewhere."

He continues: "The thing that makes a great scientist is that single-minded, total persistence and incredible dedication to work. Being able to do that hard work and do good science over many, many years and stay with it is not necessarily creative. It's creative in a sense but it's just hard scientific work and it pays off."

He points to several models of towers and boomilevers made out of balsawood that sit on a top shelf in his classroom. They are lovely to look at, these designs of simple engineering. The objective in the tower-building competition in Science Olympiad is to build the lightest tower with the most structural efficiency that can support a load of up to 15 kilograms—about 33 pounds. These designs won high marks in the competition last year.

"Being an engineer, I can spot these kids, the kid who will take something like that and focus on it and never quit. Some of the projects have hundreds and hundreds of hours put into them."

"Retreads"

Moving from a professional science career into teaching isn't a piece of cake, but it does have its advantages. Twenty-five years of experience with military bureaucracy taught Neznanski how to write terrific proposals, and he's turned that knack into successful grant-writing. When he set out to find funds to build up the physics lab, "I shot for the sky," he says. His aim was true. The lab now is equipped with $80,000 worth of equipment—computers, software, probes, gauges, calculators, you name it—thanks to the likes of Hewlett-Packard, the Wiegand Foundation, and the BK Booster Club.

But the best knack Neznanski brought with him into the classroom was an innate talent for teaching young people, says former mentor Henry Krewer.

"A lot of teachers want to do a job and they want to walk out feeling good, forgetting how the kids walk out: They walk out baffled, they walk out upset. If you feel like, 'Oh, I did a great presentation; that was clever and that was wonderful,' the kids don't know anything about that. Larry was the other way. Larry wanted to know that every kid in the room knew what he was talking about. I think that was the biggest gift he gave to the kids."

And the best way he's found to teach is to relate physics ideas to the real and sometimes exciting world of work, where such things as repositioning a satellite in space is apt to capture the imaginations of young minds.

"That's one of the reasons why I think that 'retreads' are worthwhile," he says. "There is an element that you can bring into the classroom that's important, and that is what's going on outside [school] that students might want to do someday."

That interest may play out for a lifetime.

"I think that's where a lot of the motivation comes from. If you can get a kid to do something in science that they never thought they could do... those are life forces that are so valuable that you can't quantify them."

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