Teacher Feature: Mr. Brown

Aashka Garg

2.5.20

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A huge part of STEM’s community is the relationship between students and teachers. We interviewed one of our favorite teachers about his class and teaching style! Keep reading to learn everything about Physics with Mr.Brown . . .

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Physics is one of STEM’s hardest classes, so we asked one of our favorite physics teachers……...Mr.Brown, a couple of questions regarding the subject and his take on teaching it.

I started with some of the basic questions just so that we could understand his teaching style because no one teacher teaches the same way. 

When did you decide to teach physics? He went to college at Penn State Studies for engineering for 2 years and hated it. Pro tip:  don’t do what you hate for 2 years. However, he tutored in high school and college and really liked it, so after he took a semester off he transferred to West Chester which he said was one of the best decisions he ever made. 

How does your teaching style differ from other teachers in general? Mr. Brown responded with how it is hard to measure how his style differs but he likes to walk through a student’s thought process and guide them through how to think through something. IB Physics requires a lot of talking and lecturing in order to get through the abundance of content, but that is not Mr.Brown’s favorite thing. He prefers more hands-on processes like labs. ( From personal experience, labs are one of the best ways to learn because you are learning from actually applying concepts that can seem abstract when taught from a slideshow.) 

We asked, what he would change about the course of IB physics itself, he replied, “If I was the ‘King of the IB,’ I would reduce the amount of content that we go through in two years. In two years we manage to cover some very intricate topics like Quantum Physics, so I would whittle it down, focus less on standardized testing and more on labs.” 

The subject of Physics changes a lot from when we take it as freshmen to when we take it as upperclassmen but some things stay the same. When asked about things that he has realized throughout his years of teaching Physics, Mr.Brown replied, “Each student visualizes concepts differently, the pictures that they have changed and no two people ever think exactly the same way.” An example that he gave was how for one of the most important lessons in physics (in both 9th and 11th-grade classes), Forces, students picture forces acting in dissimilar ways. 

When asked about the most important things he has learned as a teacher when connecting with students, Mr. Brown replied that it is important to just listen and get to see them outside of a physics classroom.  During the class of 2018’s Mr.STEM, Mr.Brown played the electric guitar on stage with one of the Mr. STEM candidates Patrick Bobko!  

Physics can be one of the most stressful classes that we take but Mr.Brown uses standard-based grading which focuses more on the actual content of the class. Students have to try to achieve specific objectives during assessments so actual assessment grades are based on understanding, not points. Some other teachers are using this type of grading system as well, and so far most students seem to like it and it appears to reduce stress levels significantly. 

The interview finished off with a couple of fun questions like, “If you had unlimited resources, what experiment would you do with your students?” Mr.Brown was stumped for a couple of moments considering all the possibilities but he chooses to answer with,  “I would do something related to space or orbit. It is possible to launch weather balloons into space and then record actual quantitative data.” 

We asked about whether he thinks STEM differs from other high schools and if that difference is really apparent, he described that he has only taught in the Downingtown Area School District. Teaching at STEM is his first full teaching job and he did his student-teaching at East. He thinks that we are not as different as we might think,  but our community is definitely more close-knit and all of the student-run events are a huge part of that. He said that some of the most important parts of student life are student-run and that is a big part of what makes us so special. 

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