High School

Some of the best moments of my life were spent at Waltham High School where I taught physics and environmental science for six years. WHS was a womb where my unrooted destiny finally found an Earth to tether to. I went from being a 22 year old with no skills and a strong sense of self-hatred to feeling like I had the capability of making a small positive change in the world. I will always be thankful to the Waltham community for providing an environment that gave me the freedom to express myself and grow.

I believe that being a teacher is a sacred honor that requires a pure devotion and a capability to see beauty in every student. I strongly believe that the role of the teacher is not to simply disseminate knowledge and assess comprehension. The purpose of Education and the teacher, is to bring equality and freedom and shape the identity of America. Teachers can heal the torn soul of our nation and unifying divided people by teaching all of our students how to love and respect one another and by showing them a pathway towards peace and happiness. This is why I believe that teachers should have a voice in the policy and development of the US and why teachers need to be collectively taught to guide the destiny of a nation (my plan is in the Vision section).

On this webpage I go over how I implemented a few of my core teaching beliefs, which are:

• Every student has the power to change their destiny.
• The purpose of school is not imprisonment but rather to provide equality and freedom that was hard won through sweat, tears and blood.
• All students are guaranteed a good grade if they provide devotional hard work and follow the SOMDEplan. In my teaching style, I de-emphasize the role of tests and provide many avenues of grade improvement ranging from corrections on tests, labs and hw to providing an eclectic and vast range of extra credit.
• A teacher should always convey that they have a genuine love for every student and that they truly care about their future. A teacher should also create an environment where students within a class feel that they are part of a family.
• A teacher should show students the infinite beauty of science that transcends the words and knowledge of a textbook.
• Effective teaching requires infusing entertainment actively into education.

The Birth of Destiny

The beginning of the academic year has a nervous fertility and a magical romance that sets the cadence for the rest of the year. I spend nearly the entire first class introducing myself through the layers of my life journey. I do this to show the students that I am not some esoteric creature blessed with great intelligence but rather, just like them, a struggling human thrown into the turbulence of this world trying to create something beautiful. In my introductory powerpoint (provided below with notes), I start by presenting my report cards and physical fitness report to show how closely I lived next to a debilitating series of failure. As the powerpoint progresses, I talk about how I tried to crawl out of the cesspool of bad grades, breaking family, depressive self-hatred and no self-confidence (below is a picture of an excerpt from my powerpoint).

After showing my failure and desperation, I talk about how I slowly broke free from the cycles of failure by amassing a collection of small opportunities and projects which eventually became the building block which I used to build my structure of destiny (the image below, from my powerpoint, shows each building block. This is my most recent destiny-map which I showed at a recent presentation to high school students).

In my introductory powerpoint (provided below with notes), I also talk about the purpose of education by describing the year that I spent working with an NGO in India. There, I experienced the beauty of India as I meandering through villages and mountains surrounded by farmland....but I also worked with children in a city who were inescapably imprisoned within the cycles of destiny. Robbed of any education, children as young as 10, worked full time from 9-6pm, six days a week. Having only the one skill of sowing, they were trapped. I taught my students, that even though school seems like a prison...they were created from the suffering, shattered dreams and agony of countless people who wished freedom for their children. Education is designed to give greater equality and freedom to everyone and the power to escape the cycles of destiny.

The Promise of Growth and Success

When I was younger…I tried so hard…and yet I could never achieve the grades that I wanted. Within that failure, brewed a growing self-hatred and a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. I felt I was poisoned with a stupidity that I could never cure. Years later, when I became a teacher, I wanted to create an algorithm…a pathway…that would empower and ensure success to anyone that was willing to devote the time and effort. And so, I created the SOMDEplan, a contract where I promised the student a good grade if they unwaveringly followed what I thought was the path of success through the design of my course.

Tests, Homework and Labs

Corrections

A core component of my teaching philosophy was to provide opportunities where students could refine their grades by making corrections on tests, homework and labs. After I passed back corrected assignments, students had a few days to come after-school for help, where I would go over everything they did incorrectly. They would then write all the corrections and come back another day where I would re-test them, sometimes through verbal questions and sometimes by providing a similar problem. Sometimes students had to go through a few of these cycles before they had mastered the material. Once they successfully defended, they could raise a given test grade by one letter grade, and they could raise a given homework and lab grade to a full 100%. These corrections placed a very significant burden on my time and were sometimes susceptible to procrastinators but I was sustained by several dedicated students every year, who otherwise would have done poorly in a traditional class, but because of corrections, showed definitive improvements and a deep comprehension of the subject matter.

Tests

Tests are important because they gauge processing speed, ability to memorize and work during limited time. However, I feel that some teachers put too much emphasis on tests and perhaps do that to make their grading easier. Relying primary on tests as an form of assessment, in my opinion, filters out students who may otherwise be able to vibrantly flourish in a project-based environment. Therefore, it is vitally important to have a variety of different assignments. In my teaching practice, I significantly decreased the role of tests, making the influence of 1 test equivalent to 1-2 lab assignments.

During class, while students took notes, I would often drop explicit statements like, "this will definitely be on your test", to encourage note taking and paying attention. My tests were extremely simple and straight forward. With the exception of the AP class, I would not expect students to innovate during a test or be 'creative' with problem solving. To me, a test was meant to capture the key concepts and problems that I wanted students to retain as templates for more complex problems that they would face in labs.

One of my greatest frustrations as a young student was studying for a test with everything I had, only to find that the test focused on something completely different. Those failures hurt the most because I had studied so hard and it was as if I had not. So, to prevent a similar experience in my students, I always made the last question on my test the same: "Write down anything else that you remember that was not covered on the test". This allowed students to regurgitate everything that they had learned but that my test failed to cover. Some students could collect a decent amount of extra credit points this way (sometimes enough to raise their test grade by half a letter...or more).

Homework

I would give problem sets from the textbook and worksheets like everyone else. However I would also try to craft homework questions that were inspired by real life experiences. Below are a few examples.

• This example is from the kinematics section: "This is a true story. When I was working with an NGO in India, I went to a cliff next to a village. There, as we all peered down, we wondered how high up we were. Everyone made guesses and someone said "perhaps we will never truly know"……and that is when I said, “I can tell you right now…I only need a rock and a watch”. Describe in detail what I did and then derive the equation I used to calculate the height of the cliff."
• This example is from the forces section: "On an episode of South Park, there was a sled race between a group of boys and a group of girls. The boys wanted to win so they recruited Eric Cartman to be on their team because he was known to have a good amount of mass. If the boys and girls used exactly the same type of sled, would having greater mass on the sled be advantageous, disadvantageous or make no difference at all (in real life…accounting for friction)? "
• This is an example from the fluids section: "True Story: I was watching an episode of ‘This Old House” and they wanted to put all the windows at the same elevation (they were going to cut through the wall, to install new windows). The problem was that the house’s floor was slanted a bit, so you couldn’t just measure from the floor to the window. They only needed a transparent long hose and water. How were they able to use this to determine the appropriate place for all the windows throughout the house?"
• This is an example from the electricity section: "True story: I was watching the show "Nature" which was documenting the journey of a group of baboons. Meant to keep baboons out of an area, there was a high voltage electrified fence. How did the baboons get to the other side? There were no trees to climb on or holes and they did not burrow underneath the fence. Hint: think about our discussions on electric fields and how current flows...the solutions these baboons figured out is nothing short of genius which most humans would probably never figure out."

The one below requires the students to calculate whether a daredevil can jump over a car:

Here is a really fun example that I thought of at the gym. When racking the weights, such as after finishing benching, the question that always lingers in my mind is how many weights can I leave on one side of the bar before it tips over? So, in the torque section, the students solved it:

I would also give many assignments that were non-standard but I thought would enhance the meaning of science. Below are some examples that I remember:

• Students had to contact the oldest member of their family and interview them on the role and function of technology and science in their lives when they were younger. The purpose of this assignment was to encourage students to reflect on the meaning of family and to make connections with the elderly while also contemplating the role of science and technology in human life
• I had students find rocks and do a bit of research to identify the rock. In class we did a show-and-tell pageantry in class. This was to emphasize that science requires us to look deeper into everything that we take for granted. Rocks all around us are millions of years old and their birth and life story is extraordinary.
• I had students write down their dreams and career aspirations and what steps they would have to take to accomplish that.

Labs

I believed that creativity in problem solving should be displayed in the labs and that labs should be a central part of teaching. In contrast to some teachers who use worksheets to guide students, I would often start with an open ended adventure question which students would have to brainstorm for homework and then on the next day I would give some more guidance. I demanded fairly rigorous lab report writeups.

To add greater rigor to labs, I taught material outside of the state strands. This included basic statistics like standard deviation and the t-test. I also taught students basic trendline fitting and regression analysis through excel and how to use the resulting equation to make predictions. In some labs, students had to learn how to input formulas into excel to process large amounts of data. Below are a few labs that I created that have a small amount of innovation.

• Detective Lab: I developed this lab and ran it in the first few weeks of class (even with my freshmen). In this lab, students were told, "you are a scientist employed by the crime unit at a police department. The police are investigating a grotesque crime, in which they have found a leg (up to the top of the knee) of a victim. They really need a profile of the victim, in order to start the investigation. Your job is to determine the height of the victim based only on the length of the victim’s leg. In addition, the detectives would really like a formula, so that they can plug in any person’s leg length and find their approximate height." To accomplish this lab, students first measured the length of everyone's leg and their height and entered it into excel. Next they produced a scatterplot and fitted a line to the data, obtaining an equation and a R-squared value. Using the equation they were able to predict the height of the victim. We also grabbed random people from the hallway and saw how well the equation could predict their height and they calculated a percent error. In their discussion sections they talked about anomalies and whether their equation could generalize to different age groups.
• Projectile Motion Lab: This is a classic lab that many teachers run, where students make catapults and then try to shoot targets. In my version, I add greater rigor, asking students to experimentally find some fundamental quantities about their catapult and then use it to predict where the projectile will land in a different condition. Because of the setup, they have to use the quadratic equation. Additionally, I have them find the mean and standard deviation of their launcher, to assess its precision. Afterwards they do the usual percent error calculation.

• Momentum Lab: Within science and especially within physics there are typically two approaches towards solving a problem: theoretical and experimental. One of the most beautiful moments is when both of these approaches meet. In this lab, I wanted the students to taste how an experimental physicists tries to confirm a theoretical equation/prediction by collecting data, fitting a trendline and calculating certain constants to see if they match the theory.

• Ballistic Pendulum Lab: When I came to WHS, the physics department primarily only had stopwatches and meter sticks as resources to conduct experiments. I wrote a few grants which allowed me to buy sensors that could collect data and it gave me greater freedom to try different labs. This lab was motivated by a classic physics problem. I was also motivated to run it after talking to state troopers to see if they would come in class and talk about how they use physics (they sent me a packet of info but said they were too busy to come in). In this lab students calculate the muzzle velocity of a 'gun' (a small projectile launcher I had) by building and then experimenting with a ballistic pendulum.

• AP Momentum Lab: With my advanced placement class, because they had a much greater grasp of physics, I had the freedom to explore and even mix multiple subjects within one lab. In this lab, students first have to mix ideas from momentum and projectile motion and then derive a formula. Next, as often happens in real life, because there is great uncertainty on various numbers, they have to input their equation into excel and computationally create a spreadsheet of numbers which they use to determine the range of feasible answers.

• Energy Lab: I like this lab because I include concepts from other sections (such as forces/friction) and require students to first design a car, characterize its properties and then calculate how far it will go after rolling down an inclined plane. After calculating, they make experimental measurements, find the percent error and use the standard deviation to explain any deviation between expected and actual results.

• The Bungee Cord Lab: This lab was conceived during a discussion with my mother, who was throwing away a bunch of my things, including many strong elastic cords, and said that I would never use them. So, I made a lab for my AP physics class, centered around a 'real life problem' and I think it turned out pretty awesome.

• Instrument-making lab: This was in the waves section and students would have to use the equations for standing waves to design and make novel instruments.
• Smash Bro. Lab: I would do this lab right before Christmas vacation, which is when the students would be going crazy anyways. Using the video game, I had different characters fall and throw items to calculate various constants in the projectile motion equations, to highlight how video game developers often use physics equations to model movement. Afterwards, we would play the game as well.

Extra Credit

Some teachers believe that there should be minimal extra credit because it distracts from the main academic journey and it inadvertently teaches students to be undisciplined because it promotes procrastination, late submissions and a path to reverse bad decisions. I have respect for this view and agree with much of it. My teaching style was the diametric opposite of this and I gave excessive amounts of extra credit. In my opinion, a school should have both types of teachers, so that students can learn from the lessons of each style.

I used extra credit as a way to customize and individualize the growing romance between the subject matter and the student. I also used it as a spice to motivate participation and fascinating side adventures that would enhance my teaching and make the experience more interesting. Nevertheless, I always capped how much extra credit could affect the final grade. In general, the most a student could boost their quarter grades was by 3 point (eg B- to B), however it was possible to get up to 6 points (doing so was very time consuming). Below, I list a few different types of extra credit that I gave.

Participation: Every time a student answered question during class, they received one participation point. At the beginning of every class I would review the previous lesson and if a student provided a good review of several concepts, I would give 2-3 participation points. At the end of the quarter I would count all the participation points and normalize it such that if a student participated for about 2/3rds of the classes they would receive a half-a-letter boost in their grade.

Projects: To individualize the learning experience, I would offer extra credit for any project that would mix physics with a student’s passion. I would help them brainstorm an idea and give them a rough rubric for how many points they could obtain given different amounts of work. In general, they would have to work very hard to get the maximum number of points which could be as high as a ½ letter grade boost. They would present these projects to their peers. Below are a few examples that I remember off the top of my head.

• an athlete collected data on the rate of fatigue during a workout and the rate of improvement across multiple workouts and then used regression analysis to make a predictive model.
• a few friends built a toboggan with wheels and based on measurements calculated and predicted beforehand how far the toboggan would roll down a hill.
• a cheerleader examining the effect of changing the center of mass (by applying different weights to the feet) on backflips.
• a musician used the equations for standing waves to calculate the locations of frets when constructing a novel electric guitar. He also built novel pickups from magnets and wire while experimenting with the number of loops and strength of the magnet.

End of the Year: I feel that teachers need to motivate introspection in students, where they examine the purpose and trajectory of their lives and where they think about their dreams and how they will accomplish it. I had a few homework assignments on this throughout the year but the most focused effort happened at the end of the year as finals were approaching. I created a huge survey of mostly philosophical questions (linked below). The objective was that students would pick several of those questions and deeply think about them and write responses. If they did a very thorough job they could receive upto a 3 point boost to their grade.

Miscellaneous: As a way to motivate interesting side-adventures, I would give many different types of spontaneous participation points. I don’t remember most of them, but below are a few examples.

• When students would deescalate an argument or compliment one of their classmates
• When students would walk past my door between classes and they would yell something beautiful about science.
• When a student would share anything (eg a personal story with a life lesson, a science story from TV) or bring something in for show-and-tell.
• When they would make something artistically beautiful related to science to decorate the classroom.
• When they would participate in a class song or dance or if they composed a song, below are two examples of many.

The Feeling of Family

To me, teaching was a devotional artform where my expression was unlike anything else in my normal life. Because I felt teaching was a sacred honor, I saw my students as my family. I tried to convey that one core feature of happiness in humans is creating an inclusive and diverse community where everyone genuinely cares for one another. However it is very difficult to create such a community and it often requires students to learn how to see beauty in every classmate. To break the barriers formed by cliques and superficial observations, I would do things like show-and-tell, where students would bring something of value and describe it. I would ask 'party questions' which were often philosophical questions or 'random' questions like, "describe an interesting memory you have of a tree". Often when one student would share something, it would remind another student of a similar memory, which would lead to a chain reaction of sharing. I am sure part of the eagerness for sharing was to 'distract' me from teaching, but I always felt that those moments were some of the most important. Many students, many years later after graduation, told me that they remember little of the physics that I taught...but instead did remember life lessons, stories and moments of sharing.

At the end of most classes, I would stop the class 5 minutes early and while the other students talked to one another, I would sit down with a different student everyday and ask them how things were going. I called this “How’s Life”. Some students really appreciated this, because it made them feel like someone really cared beyond just 'hows it going?'... and some of them even decreased the frequency of their disruptions. These conversations helped me as well, because I learned about each student's struggles. For example, often students that I initially thought were lazy were actually working after school jobs until 10pm to help support their families, causing them to pass in assignments late and be chronically tired in class.

To further the feeling of family, we would celebrate each student's birthday (and for those that had it during the summer, we would pick a day during the school year). I would bring in my guitar or electric keyboard and compose a birthday song on the spot.

At the end of the year, I would take a Family Picture of the entire class. I would ask every student what sort of effect they wanted and I would photoshop that effect into the class picture (eg adding an extra appendage, looking muscular, morphing with an animal). I would print these out and give it to every student at the end of the final. Some students who contacted me years later told me that they still have those pictures.

The Beauty of Science

I spent my undergraduate years lost within the cycles of binge-and-purge: rapidly learning and then flushing away knowledge. Because I was chronically sleep deprived and surfing at the breaking edge of procrastination, by the end of my education, I felt no connection or unifying understanding of physics. It was only when I became a teacher and began digesting and regurgitation the fundamentals that my romance with physics began again and I started falling in love again. Within every lesson, I tried very hard to convey the larger beauty of science that transcended the boring and stale words of the textbooks. It is hard to show how I did that, because it was woven into my expression and was spontaneous and always changing.

Entertainment and Education

I remember from my days as a high school student, sitting in class all day, only to go home and do hours of homework that high school was a brutally difficult time, when nothing seemed certain and everything was changing. It is unreasonable to expect that students will be naturally attentive in class and capable of retaining and learning complex material. For this reason, I believe, to be an effective teacher, one must also be entertaining. Especially for someone that is not inherently funny (such as myself) this is a difficult task to do. I have listed below a few examples that I remember with the overall idea that it was important to change the cadence of the class every 15-30 minutes. It is hard to remember what I did because majority of it was spontaneous or planned the day before. Some of what I remember are:

• Telling an usual story from my life (or from a student) that often had a life lesson. Some of these stories were premeditated because I knew students found them funny (or had good messages) and I had rehearsed them for dramatic effect. Many stories naturally came out. For example, I used to tell the story of when I was at BU and would love to go dumpster diving through a science dumpster. Initially my roomates would never go but, one night, after they got very drunk, they agreed to go and underneath the midnight moon, like dolphins jumping in and out of the water, we had so much fun and found many amazing things (I found an amazing metal pipe). After an hour or so, the police came and since I was the only one that was sober, I went and told them about the philosophy of recycling and giving new destiny to something that was destined to destruction...surprisingly he let us continue. My roomates said they really had a good time, but the next day they couldn't remember anything because they drank so much. The story would lead to discussions on alcohol consumption, recycling, and non standard ways of having fun.
• Everytime I would show a demo, I would become ‘pregnant’ with them, which meant that I would stuff them down my shirt and then give birth to them in middle of class. This would build suspense because they didn't know when it would be born and I would make labor sounds intermittently.
• In some classes towards the end of the day, we would do a few minutes of calisthenics before class began.
• I would rescue text books that people would throw away at WHS. I would have students pick a random page number and then I would cut that page out, give them the page, and tell them their fortune.
• I had a small library of rescued books and would do 5 minutes of story time where I would read them as if we were in a kindergarten class. One of these books was '100 ways to make the world better'.
• Before holidays, I would have arts and craft time. A few times we made a Christmas tree decorated with physics facts and decorations.
• A few times I composed and performed (with students) different dances to express what we were learning
• One year, two students (who were not in my class) would hit my door everytime they passed by for lunch while I was teaching. Initially I called them the ‘distractors’ but after I caught them, I made them the ‘purifiers’ and they would stop by whenever passing for lunch and I would give them little pieces of science to stick around the school.
• Sometimes we would take thematic pictures…like where everyone wore the same color to class.
• Below is an example of how I would try to integrate humor into my powerpoints. This is the title page of the chapter devoted to 'States of Matter'. The picture is of a card game that I had created a number of years ago. So, to begin with, this could lead to imaginative discussions with class on how they would integrate science into innovative games. The boundaries are pictures of frost that I took, which could lead to discussions on the solid state of matter, pattern generation, and beauty. I chose this picture because it is of a famous video game (Metal Gear Solid) which has characters like 'Solid Snake' and 'Liquid Snake' and this could lead to discussions on the video game and whether they used proper physics simulators. Because my mother is modeling in the picture (she had applied some sort of beauty product), it could lead to discussions on how to honor your parents and the unreasonable expectation of 'beauty' in the digital age.

Life Lessons

High School is a time when many students stand at the junction of their destiny; where they begin to form and solidify their personalities, their dreams, their core beliefs and how they will interact with society. During this time, they also begin to rebel at home and spend less time with family as they immerse themselves in friends, social media and technology. That is why moments in class are precious and sacred, for some students, it is the final family-like environment where someone older genuinely cares about their destiny. That is why I believe that a teacher should gently include discussions around life lessons. It is important to note, that discussing life lessons is difficult because, as a teacher, you never want to lecture, indoctrinate and brainwash your students. Whenever I would give a life lesson, even through a silly personal story, I would always make sure to give the disclaimer that these are just my opinions...which are highly flawed and only optimized for me...and that these stories are meant to foster discussion. Most of these lessons I forget, below are a few:

• Within every infinitesimal drop is an infinite universe of beauty. Nothing in this world is boring, every single moment and experience has countless layers of patterns to examine and enjoy. As you age, your brain will trick you into thinking that the world is boring. You can overcome this by always learning and being curious.
• Developing the strength to change your destiny takes persistent hard work that has to be maintained over a very long time. For me it took 10 years before I started seeing changes. During this time you will fail many times and each of those failures will hurt and you feel frustrated as if there is no solution.
  • One part of developing your destiny is amassing many small opportunities, accomplishments, skills, knowledge and projects which one day will become your building blocks.
• A fundamental component of living a happy life is creating a diverse community of people that genuinely care for one another. This is hard to do, because it will require you to change alot. You will need to learn how to find beauty in everyone and how to be inclusive and open minded.
  • A key component of this is to learn how to discuss and not argue. You will have to learn how to sometimes let go of what you want, and learn how to mix another person's ideas to create an idea that both can love. This only comes with practice.
  • For me, I felt initially like no community would want me and that no one liked me. Instead of becoming bitter, I incubated within myself and created my own style. Then, I created my own community that was open to everyone. Slowly, over many years, we created a small community.
• There are many things in life that you cannot control and, for me, I sometimes get peace when I detach myself from the outcome and focus just on what I should do.
• Moments in my life when I felt weak and when I was overwhelmed with depression were the times when I grew the most because it forced me to look and create a solution. Being weak is a right of passage to accomplishing something new.
  • The solutions that you find when climbing out of the very negative places in your life can become very useful for others that are stuck somewhere similar. The more of these obstacles you face, the more you can help the world.
• I believe that a person has a duty to family, self, environment and society.
  • I believe it is our fundamental duty to actively make this world a better place.
• Learning to eat healthy, hydrate and regulate good sleep cycles (even if that meant sacrificing partying) was crucial for me to become efficient and reduce persistent fatigue
• Art and Science are both about looking at Beauty through different perspectives until we can find truth.
• I found it liberating when I detached myself from trying to 'look good'. I began to notice a greater range of beauty in myself and in others. I began to feel that it was pretty silly to base so many things on just a few ounces of fat and bone in the right places.
• Often, it feels as if romantic relationships are the most important part of life...but in my experience, they are only one beautiful degree in a circle of 360 degrees. I have never been in a romantic relationship and I certainly don't advise anyone to follow that...but I am a control study and what my life suggests is that a person can be fully happy without one. So, don't feel bad if you are not in a relationship now.
  • In my opinion, the core to a good relationship (romantic or otherwise) is building a very solid foundation of happiness that is generated from within...without the need of too many external things.
• In my opinion, don't use drugs and alcohol as the only way to feel like you can have fun or go wild. Your happiness and ability to access the full range of experiences should come primarily from within.
• In my opinion, to be happy you have to have a diverse portfolio of things that make you happy...so that when one thing starts to go down, another aspect will be going up.
• Most of us have access to all the building materials and tools to make heaven on earth.