Richard Barrans, Jr.

Despite my public schooling, I have been interested in science for as long as I can remember. I attended Johns Hopkins University for undergraduate school. I did research there for one year for professor Reuben Hwu, a synthetic organic chemist now at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Although I was already hooked on chemistry when I started, that project would have done the trick if I weren’t. I studied the selectivity of reductions by calcium metal dissolved in liquid ammonia. That reaction involves lots of the features that make bench chemistry fun: foul smell (ammonia), exotic glassware (dry ice condenser to keep the ammonia liquid), pretty colors (active metals make a deep blue solution in ammonia), and exotic substances (calcium metal reacts with water; liquid ammonia and dry ice do not exist at room temperature).

After graduating from Hopkins, I went straight to the wonderland called Caltech for graduate school. I worked for Dennis Dougherty on host-guest chemistry. While there, I spent two years as a recitation T.A. for Chem 1. I also taught chemistry in the Student Support Program, a preparatory program for pre-freshmen, for several summers. I found that I enjoyed teaching, especially explaining concepts in an accessible way.

It took me seven years to finish grad school, mostly because I was having too much fun at Caltech to want to leave. I finally defended my dissertation in 1992.

I took a postdoctoral position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where I stayed until the end of 1994. I worked in metals separation chemistry where I designed, synthesized, and studied ligands to remove certain metal ions from complex mixtures. While at Los Alamos, I had the good fortune to participate in the Lab’s Science Consultant Program. This involved traveling to the nearby Jemez Pueblo one day a month, where I conducted hands-on science activities with 4th-8th grade students at the San Diego Mission School (Now the San Diego Riverside Charter School). It was tiring, but I really enjoyed working with the kids.

I took a staff position at Argonne National Laboratory in 1995. I worked in the field of metals separation there as well. Since there were no Pueblo schools in the Chicago suburbs, I had to look elsewhere for opportunities to teach. I delivered occasional substitute Organic Chemistry lectures at Benedictine University, and co-directed the Ph.D. research of a chemistry graduate student at Loyola University Chicago. I also discovered the “Ask-A-Scientist” web site at Argonne, where students (and others) can post questions for scientists. I volunteered to be one of the question-answering scientists, and over the course of the next several years answered several hundred questions in my spare time.

After five years at Argonne, I moved to the PG Research Foundation as Assistant Director (later Director of Academic Programs). I negotiated contracts with universities, oversaw the sponsored university research, and carried out some in-house research in the field of—you guessed it—metals separation. My research and administrative duties permitted no teaching whatsoever.

In 1994, I quit my job and enrolled in the School-Based Master of Education program at John Carroll University. This intensive one-year initial certification program put me and a terrific group of talented classmates through a barrage of foundational education courses in the summer, followed by an immersion internship at a school. The internship began with observing our mentor teachers for the first semester, and ended with student teaching for 3/4 of the second semester. My internship was at Collinwood Senior, a comprehensive high school in the Cleveland Municipal School District with a largely black student population. I taught two sections of chemistry and one of biology. Since all science classes at Collinwood were two periods long, my teaching load amounted to 252 contact minutes per day.

I found the teaching often frustrating, occasionally rewarding, and always challenging. My career in science had not prepared me to manage an unruly classroom, to design exercises that discouraged copying, or to persuade students affecting helplessness that they should learn how to do what was being taught. I learned that teaching was more than just a matter of explaining the subject matter in a sensible way, or even of conveying my love of science to the students. Instead, it required always groping for a way to connect the subject at hand to the students’ interests. Most of the time, I didn’t find that connection.

I moved to Wyoming in 2004. In the Spring of 2005, I was hired to teach Physics 1050, “Concepts of Physics,” at the University of Wyoming. I had great fun teaching that course for the next seven semesters. On occasion, I have also taught PHYS 1090, “Fundamentals of the Physical Universe,” ASTR/GEOL 1070, “Earth: Its Physical Environment,” and PHYS 1210, “Engineering Physics I.” This semester I am back to teaching PHYS 1050 and am also teaching PHYS 1210 again with a new twist.

The department is experimenting with “studio physics:” small class size with integrated lecture/lab and small student/faculty ratio. We’re teaching two sections of PHYS 1210 as studio physics, along with one section of lecture. I’m covering the two studio physics sections with Danny Dale and Jinke Tang, while Rudi Michalak gets to teach the lecture section. This should be interesting!

I have lost count of the number of questions I have answered for Ask-A-Scientist. It is in the thousands by now.