Looking for a physics teacher

My school, St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, is looking for a full time physics teacher for 2014-15. St. Andrew’s is an outstanding coeducational 100% boarding school situated on 2500 acres of farmland, 1 hour from Philadelphia.

Here are a few other tidbits about this job and my school:

• The culture of the school is unique, and really must be experienced to be believed. 300 students and 80 faculty living and working together to find deep joy in learning, working to make the world a better place, and to create a compassionate, caring community that rejects the culture of pettiness and cynicism that can often infect the traditional high school.
• The school draws students from all over the world and is 100% need blind in its admissions. Nearly half of the student body receives financial aid, and the average grant is $38,000 (this is almost unheard of in the independent school world).
• The school is led by a visionary headmaster, Tad Roach. To get a sense of what an incredible educational leader he is, I encourage you to read a few of his chapel talks.
• The faculty are incredible. They are experts in their fields, deeply committed to the craft of teaching, collegiality and continuous improvement. I credit many of them with helping me to rekindle my interest in the humanities.
• You’ll have a lot of autonomy. One of the luxuries of teaching in private school, and our school in particular, is that you are given a large amount of control over what and how you teach, yet at the same time, you’ll have a tremendous network of colleagues with with to share ideas and gain feedback.
• You’ll have a great opportunity to shape the future of the science curriculum at our school. We use a modified version of the modeling curriculum in physics and chemistry, along with standards based grading, and very open to your ideas for how we can continue to experiment and improve science education for our students. You’ll be part of a vibrant and very collaborative department—we’re doing some very interesting work to create a longitudinal study of a subset of our students to help us define, measure and collect evidence of the skills we are trying to teach. We also have an amazing department chair.
• You’ll even have a chance to help shape the future of our building, as we are in the very early stages of planning for a two stage renovation of the science building.
• Clasess are very small, usually around 12 students, and a typical load is 3 or 4 sections.
• You’ll have tremendous resources to support you in your teaching. The physics department has a special endowment to bring leading scientists to campus to deliver a lecture and speak to classes (past speakers have included Brian Green, Bill Phillips, Janna Levin, Jill Tarter, and this year, Stephon Alexander. We have resources to bring teaching experts to campus to observe classes and offer coaching, like Rhett Allain who visited laster year, and Eugenia Etkina this year. We have the resources to provide for almost any professional development opportunity you can imagine.
• As a small school, we’re also very flexible. If you have interest in teaching another subject, this can likely be accommodated in the future. In my time here, I’ve taught multiple levels of physics, computer science, mathematics and worked as a college counselor.

In short, the community is truly inspiring. If you’ve never considered boarding school teaching, you’ll be amazed by the connections you can form with students and the things they can accomplish when you encourage their interests outside the school day. This year, I’ve helped students launch a nascent robotics club, work on developing an Arduino setup to allow the dryers to text students when their laundry is done, and am working with a group of girl who are learning programming and web design in order to build a clothes sharing app for their dorm, and helping another girl to launch a modern physics club to study string theory and other recent development in physics.

Here’s the link to the job description. Please feel free to ask questions (confidentially) in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them or connect you with those who can.

Advertisement