As the school year starts, students and staff begin to get into a routine. Many likely have noticed new faces wandering the halls. There are eight new high school teachers this year. Two of these teachers are in the science department and team together teaching physics. Tyler Weatherwax and Kate Baker are veteran teachers looking forward to continuing their careers at the high school.
Following the resignation of former physics educator Nick Holt, who left for Coopersville Middle school to teach where he lives and children attend, on top of the transition of Erin Berryhill to a part-time role for herself and her family, the science door was open to some new faces. Weatherwax and Baker both jumped at the opportunity to fill the spots. Weatherwax took the full-time role while Baker opted for the part time position.
Both Weatherwax and Baker bring a teaching concept with them they have been applying to classes. The concept of modeling is what both have found to be the best way to teach students.
“Modeling is giving students the opportunity to see something in real life, then give them time to experiment with it and look at different patterns, then make their own conclusions,” Baker said.
Since the first day, Baker has thoroughly enjoyed teaching at the high school and admires the environment that the students and faculty create.
“Everyone has been kind and welcoming,” Baker said. “It seems like a strong community and the [good] things that I heard were correct about the high school.”
Baker has taught for a collective 12 years, since she began her journey in 1999, taking spans of time off periodically.
“I taught for seven years then I took some time off when I had my kids, then I went back for five and then the pandemic happened and I took a couple years off after that,” Baker said.
Baker is passionate about physics and education however she did not originally plan to go into teaching. She only made this decision when she had a realization at Michigan State University.
“I was a science and physics major, at some point I looked around and thought I don’t want to have a career where I work without human interaction,” Baker said. “I’m much more of a people person.”
Overall Baker is pleased with her role as an educator and the community it provides. While Baker is new to the high school, her new teacher partner has some prior experience at Northview as well.
“I went here to Northview before going to Ferris State [University] to study to be a pharmacist,” Weatherwax said. “I did not love school but I did love the community aspect of it.”
Though he did not enjoy the learning part of school, he did have mentors who saw potential in him to pursue teaching, even as a student at the high school.
“Mrs. Ely seeded in my mind as a junior [in high school] to go into teaching,” Weatherwax said. “I told her she was crazy, and by the end of my freshman year [of college] I switched majors.”
Weatherwax’s biggest goal that he would like to achieve while teaching is for each student he educates to apply what they learn in his class to something outside of the classroom. He wants to achieve this through his personal teaching style.
“The concept of modeling is where we take an experiment, take data, then explain what happened and you build a conceptual model and try to apply that to something else,” Weatherwax said.
Both Baker and Weatherwax have high aspirations, they want to teach and expand students’ knowledge of physics while making it a fun subject.
