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Citation For ?Science Teaching-Lisa Karlich

Fun with Physics—Really
With superheroes and skateboarding tricks, Karlich almost makes it look easy

Lisa Karlich is used to the grumbling.

“Physics is so hard,” her students say. “I’m never gonna get it.”

The laments are familiar to every high school physics teacher, but Karlich probably hears them more than most. She teaches at School of the Future, where every senior, regardless of ability or prior interest, takes her class.

Once there, however, students learn through hands-on activities and topics they might never have connected with physics. They build balsa-wood models of water towers and load them up to see how much weight they can bear. They investigate the laws of force and energy behind amusement park rides. They calculate how strong Spiderman’s web would have to be to stop a speeding train.

Many find they not only can do physics, they actually like doing it.

“At the end of the year, they’re so surprised at how much they’ve gotten,” Karlich said. “I love that moment in class when a kid who’s struggling with something, all of a sudden the lights go on. And then it’s like they’re a babbling brook, they’re making all these connections.”

Karlich’s students range from future engineers and scientists to those who struggle with basic math. One of her favorite stories is of working with a learning-disabled student on his science exhibition. (Exhibitions are in-depth projects that School of the Future students complete and then present to a panel of teachers and peers in lieu of taking Regents exams.)

The student was petrified at starting a 10 to 15 page paper on science, so Karlich urged him to cover a topic he was passionate about: skateboarding. Proceeding a paragraph at a time, the student produced a 12-page paper on how Newton’s laws explain skate tricks. His exhibition received the highest mark: “Mastery with Distinction.”

Karlich tries to bring creativity to all her lessons. One favorite was physics for forensics, capitalizing on the “CSI” phenomenon, in which students had to solve crimes based on physical evidence. Another was physics for superheroes, in which students calculated the tensile strength of Spiderman’s web.

Throughout, Karlich’s goal is to create an environment in which students can experience scientific discovery for themselves.

“We set up our classrooms so our kids are scientists,” she says. “They are figuring out the governing laws of the physical world on their own. And when they do that, they’re more likely to internalize and hold on to it and understand it because they’re part of the creative process.”

In order to ensure that her students don’t get lost along the way, Karlich spends a tremendous amount of time planning her classes. And while she gives her students plenty of freedom to experiment and make mistakes, she is known as extremely demanding.

“She’s considered very tough and strict,” said Catherine DeLaura, School of the Future’s principal. “But students really appreciate that because they realize she has high expectations for them and they really live up to those high expectations.”

— Daniel Weiss