A Heady Experience All Around
Photo Credit: Courtney Perry, Dallas Morning News
Advance Placement courses are tough and failure rates are high. But last year, Christopher Bruhn, an AP physics teacher at the Dallas School of Science and Engineering, challenged his 24 students: If they all passed, they could shave his head. The incentive worked. And later his pupils shaved the school’s initials onto his scalp, reports the Dallas Morning News. The “phenomenal” success of his students was a big reason why Bruhn, 47, won the second annual, statewide O’Donnell Texas AP Teacher Award, a $30,000 prize for excellence in AP teaching funded by two Texas foundations. Bruhn’s classes at the magnet school go heavy on fun demonstrations (for instance, making students’ hair stand on end, literally), and are also energized by his hyperkinetic teaching style (he’s known to jump up on desks). Bruhn — who calls his classroom an “organized circus” — also promotes dialogue: someone asks a question, he tosses it back to the class to talk it through and reach an answer. Students are free to talk at any point, no raised hands needed, so long as they don’t interrupt each other.
Students say they’re never bored. “He’s awesome, there’s no other way to put it,” junior Julia Hossu told the paper. Comments on the Morning News website from several current and former students are equally effusive. A couple former Bruhn students wrote that he inspired them to study engineering at college. And that’s pretty rewarding, too.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
