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“Being a teacher and being a priest are the same thing,” says Father Jose Medina, Ed.M.'02. That is because both provide endless opportunities to ask the big questions. For him, religion serves as a vehicle for actively examining and verifying his faith; in the classroom, Medina aims to bring the cosmological questions down to earth. And to do that, he tells stories. Lots of them.
One collection of stories revolves around adventures with his car, a 1989 Jeep, named Sally. Here is an example: “I was heading into Starbucks before work, when I noticed from the corner of my eye, that Sally was starting to roll forward, very, very slowly.” (Medina’s morning class knows that he, too, moves slowly before drinking his morning coffee.) “There was a car in front of her, and she was about to hit it. So I ran toward her screaming ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it, Sally!’” By leaning all his weight into Sally, the suddenly very alert Medina stopped his car—just short of a collision. How was he able to do this? Force equals mass times acceleration. The anecdote also illuminates for his students the abstract mathematical concept of inverse proportionality. Medina insists that the dry equations of scientific theories and mathematical formulas dissolve, over time, in students’ minds. Stories, he says, keep understanding—and curiosity—alive.
“Does the Earth really rotate around the sun? How can we be sure about the origins of the universe? Why do Newton and Einstein have conflicting theories about the nature of time? I always have a question in my mouth,” he says. More than anything, Medina hopes to instill this kind of intellectual fearlessness in his students—who, at the private Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, in Washington, D.C., are all girls. His previous teaching experiences in a public high school showed him the importance of keeping girls engaged in science education: 60 perecent of his 9th-grade physics students were girls, he says; but female enrollment in his 12th-grade Advanced Placement class, dropped off to only 12 percent. He hypothesizes that high-school girls lose a particular kind of confidence in themselves. “It’s as if their voices aren’t there anymore,” says Medina. He uses all the tools he has developed as a teacher and a priest—patience, humor, story-telling, and an open-minded, endless curiosity—to foster a highly interactive classroom that brings his students' voices to the fore. The results: so many girls are signing up for physics—and excelling under Medina's guidance—that the school is now adding both an Advanced Placement course and an introductory course designed for students who have veered away from physics because of its foundation in mathematics. One of his students recently had the misfortune of getting into a minor car accident. In Medina's class she began to question why her head had fallen forward and then whipped back, rather than match the short stop of the car. “Is this inertia?” she asked. An ecstatic, triumphant Medina quickly launched into a lesson on the laws of inertia. About the Article
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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