Hooked on Physics: Why Dr. Kenya Gordon Teaches at MICDS

Before the halls filled with students for the start of the school year, our faculty and staff gathered for our opening welcome meeting. Prior to the event, Head of School Chelle Wabrek asked our team to reflect on two fundamental questions: Why this work? And why here at MICDS? Here is what Dr. Kenya Gordon, Upper School Science & Math Teacher, shared about her journey and purpose.

Hi, everybody. It’s exciting to see all of you here again, hopefully after a restful summer. I was asked to talk a little about my work in teaching, why I do it, and, in particular, why I do it here. I want to start off by talking about why I chose physics because that has a lot to do with why I love teaching so much.

I remember in sixth grade having to read A Wrinkle in Time. When reading this book, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I bet there’s a vein of truth to this parallel world or time graph or space-time concept.” So I had my dad take me to Barnes & Noble and get a real science book, and it was Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked on physics, fascinated by learning as much as possible, and I started to get this feeling of managing my own thinking and breaking down why and how things work.

Throughout my undergrad and grad school, I fell in love with talking to other people about physics in the context of tutoring and teaching. It was kind of the only scenario where people would listen to me talk about physics. But it mattered for a grade.

I think, in particular, with being here, one of my favorite moments last year was when I had a student who was initially really nervous about the class, and I remember her crying early in the semester about not understanding something. And I’m not super good at managing other people’s negative emotions. So I said, “You don’t have to be upset about not understanding things. You have to not understand something before you can learn.” And then to have this student reach out to me and ask me, “Dr. Gordon, do you think I could self-study for the AP Physics exam?” She had been doing extremely well in my class all year. Building student confidence in their ability to understand things and helping them see the interesting side of something that can originally feel very “not interesting” is really fun to me.

Lastly, I knew when I came here for my interview and my visit there was a portion
of the interview where all of the science department was sitting in one room. I don’t remember what we talked about or what they said, but one thing I remember explicitly is them all smiling at me, like, really hard. These people are either extremely happy here or great actors. In any case, I’m very happy that I was chosen to be a part of this community and that I get to learn from people that I’m really inspired by every day. I’m just grateful for having this opportunity, and I’m excited for my second year.