Now published on AAPT website.
I was an ambitious high school student taking calculus-based engineering physics classes at the local community college in my last two years in high school. When I got to UC Berkeley, I loved starting my first semester with the upper division quantum mechanics course, Physics 137A, working my way through Griffiths’ Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I volunteered to tutor physics at the Student Learning Center, and I got my first chance to teach physics in a classroom setting, when the physics department had to find a lab instructor at the last minute. I applied and was hired as an undergraduate student instructor (UGSI). Fast-forward to the end of my graduate school career, getting disillusioned with the life of an academic researcher—and hating my PhD project and trying to write the thesis—I found my dream job teaching lower division physics at a local community college.
As a physics instructor at a small community college, the one thing I missed was having a community of physicists. At the university physics department, there were several research groups within my area of AMO physics research alone; at my small college, I was the sole full-time physics instructor. That’s when I sought out AAPT and joined as a member. I attended a couple national meetings, but my most regular and effective connection to AAPT has been through our—very active—local section for Northern California and Nevada. The semesterly section meeting is the only regular time when I can meet with a group of other physics instructors, keeping up with what they are working on and getting feedback on what I am working on.
One contribution I took part in that other physics teachers might be interested in relates to the open educational resources (OER). California has made many investments toward OER and zero textbook cost (ZTC) instructional materials in higher education, and back in 2018 we had funding to build a ZTC degree pathway for our Mathematics associate of science for transfer, and our calculus-based engineering physics classes were part of that pathway. We had OpenStax University Physics textbooks which worked as drop-in replacements for the commercial textbooks we were using, but there were no easy substitutes for the online homework system. So, we worked with our Math colleagues to program in the chapter-end textbook questions from OpenStax into the free and open-source software platform MyOpenMath (available at myopenmath.com), and the same questions are also now available on LibreTexts’ more comprehensive ADAPT platform.
What I love the most about teaching physics, especially in the community college system I teach in, is the open access mission of our community colleges. I see our role as the “bottom rung” of the academic and professional ladder that our students are climbing. We accept everyone; our classes are where everyone can get started, regardless of their previous educational history. Some of our students will go on to be top researchers in their chosen field at elite institutions (if they can survive through academia); many students in our classrooms today will go on to become competent, proficient engineers. And for many of them, this place, where they didn’t have to “have good grades to get in,” will have been the first of many open doors.