Bedford physics teacher has big sabbatical plans
Jennifer Banney, a physics teacher at Bedford High School, was recently named the recipient of the Christa McAuliffe Sabbatical award by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, which gives a teacher a year off with pay and a materials budget to bring a great educational idea to fruition, according to a press release.
How did you get interested in science?
I loved computers from a very, very young age. My degree is in computer engineering. A lot of what I learned in that degree was very science-based. It kind of took me into teaching science naturally once I graduated.
Why is problem-solving important in life and how does high school physics help instill that into students?
One of our main jobs as teachers is to … teach them to be problem-solvers. I cannot predict, with how fast the world is changing, the actual knowledge my students are going to need in 10 years. What I do know is that there are going to be problems and there are going to need to be solvers. That’s really what I’m looking to do with my students, making them the kind of people who can come up against a problem, not know the answer, back up for a moment, and think their way through it. I think high school physics is the perfect place to do that. We integrate hands-on projects with mathematics and we do try to get kids to work through problem-solving, where there’s not just one answer to what we’re going to end up doing at the end. We’re looking for them to develop their own way to get there and that practice just of not knowing how I’m going to get there and working your way through it is incredibly important.
What do you hope to accomplish during the sabbatical?
My sabbatical project is developing tabletop escape-room-type games that students would have to use their physics knowledge to work through. I’m envisioning students solving a mystery or working through finding a treasure, or something like that, but having to figure out the angle we’re going to launch something at so it hits something over here, or designing a circuit to open up something. What I envision students doing is working in collaborative groups to work through these problems in a really engaging way. The same way if you’ve ever gone to an escape room with your friends it’s just really fun. You have all these things — you don’t even quite know what the problems are at the beginning, you have to figure out what the problems are, you have to figure out how to solve them and it’s just fun, engaging, and I’m hoping that really makes kids want to delve a little more into science.
Would you like to explain how science can be loud and/or messy?
Yep. Well loud, we have a unit we do in our science class all about sound. We have kids really investigate different frequencies of sound and where they resonate and a bunch of other things and it is definitely the day in my classroom that I may take a pre-emptive Advil ’cause I do have a lot of noise going on. My classroom is kinda messy. We build things, they spill out into the hallway sometimes and we have cars racing down the hallway and that kind of stuff. But I think that’s where real learning happens for kids. It’s where things get cemented in their head when they’re doing those hands-on activities that aren’t just them quietly sitting at their desks. So it can be a little loud and a little messy, but I think it makes it a little fun.
Will you miss the classroom?
Yes, I do actually think I’ll miss the classroom a lot. I am planning to work with a lot of different New Hampshire teachers. I already have a lot of people signed on who are interested in being play testers for what I am going to be doing. I actually see myself traveling to a lot of different classrooms in New Hampshire throughout the year to watch kids interact with what I’ve built, see what works, see what doesn’t work, and really keep in contact with a lot of different teachers…. I absolutely plan to have a website where teachers, in the future, after everything is designed and produced, they’d be able to download everything and use the games in their classroom.
— Zachary Lewis
Featured image: Jennifer Banney. Courtesy photo.
