Mrs. Allison Spicer has been teaching at Barstow in the science department since 2017. Unfortunately, this is her last year teaching at Barstow. She has been instrumental in creating an effective physics curriculum.
“In general, it’s amazing and really important to learn about how you interact with the world around you. It’s good for everyone, regardless of their plans to go into a particular major,” says Spicer.
As Barstow’s only physics teacher, Mrs. Spicer has the opportunity to see students all the way through, “I love that I’m able to teach all the way through. I get to see a student’s entire physics growth. Getting to see that happen has been one of my favorite parts about teaching here.”
One of the biggest changes in the past few years is the increase in interest in physics classes among students, “There used to be a lot fewer students in AP. It’s exciting that it’s more comparable to a regular class size. I love that I’m finally getting students who plan to go on and pursue physics in college.”
Mrs. Spicer’s start at Barstow was anything but smooth, but that didn’t hold her back. “When I started here at Barstow, I was teaching AP Environmental Science, physics and AP Physics, and physical science. It was a difficult first few years because I was creating all of these courses from scratch. I was trying to create distinct and separate rules for each course, and that took some time to find the balance,” Mrs. Spicer explains.
She started finding that balance quickly, “I started doing Topics quizzes because I talked to Mr. Thurman about standard space grading. I wanted to better assess individual learning goals and help students meet those goals.”
Mrs. Spicer then continued adapting the curriculum to better fit the needs of her students. “Then we added college prep physics, which I’m really happy about. Mr. Hill encourages everyone to take physics because it can be super important for college applications, and now there’s an option for every kind of student. It’s such a different class from honors physics, which was a big change, but it was definitely for the better,” adds Spicer.
The extra show of rigor on a college application isn’t the only benefit to taking physics, though. Mrs. Spicer’s love of the natural world started young, “I grew up loving astronomy and learning about the universe. And I was really fascinated with large scale physics and extreme astrophysics.”
This love was then shaped by subsequent school experiences. “Then, at an astronomy meeting when I was in middle school we had a guest speaker. That lecture opened up a whole world of opportunity for me,” Spicer says.
This opportunity led Mrs. Spicer to study physics as an undergraduate as well. “I wound up going to school for physics intending to study either cosmology or particle physics, (the two extremes of very giant physics and very tiny physics) and I had the opportunity to do a lot of cool research as an undergrad. My end goal at the time was to become a professor of physics and to teach advanced physics at a college level with research,” Spicer said.
Mrs. Spicer then continued her education at MIT focusing on particle physics. She had the opportunity to write a course on modern physics for non physics majors in college, and it was in her lectures in that class that she learned where she wanted to take her career.
“I saw the difference between one-on-one teaching and lecture interactions and I became more interested in the latter. I wanted to form closer relationships and have more interactive conversations with students to help overcome difficulties,” says Spicer.
Teaching became a whole new way for Mrs. Spicer to interact with content she already loved. “The single most important lesson I had as a teacher was in one of my first TA sessions. I started to explain how to work a problem and a student had a question. I worked through the problem again, but the kid was like ‘Yeah, that makes sense, but how did you know to do that?’ That moment changed my whole understanding of teaching. It helped me learn how to tell people how to analyze and work through the problem,” she remembers.
This forever changed Mrs. Spicer’s life trajectory, “So, I eventually decided to leave my grad program to become a high school teacher and teach physics in this way to make it more accessible. I want students in high school to have an exposure to physics that is better than what I got.”
Mrs. Spicer returned home to Kansas City after college to begin her fruitful career in education that has brought her many memories and taught her lessons along the way.
Her students aren’t the only ones who have benefitted from Mrs. Spicer’s journey with high school education. Teaching has also given things back to Mrs. Spicer, allowing her to learn from her students just as much as they’ve learned from her.
“Teaching here has undoubtedly made me a stronger teacher and more empathetic human being. Teaching in general has done those things. I’m really happy that I’ve had this opportunity to become a better version of myself. I grew up with some extreme biases that teaching in general has really helped me to recognize and overcome,” says Mrs. Spicer.
Mrs. Spicer notes the ways in which teaching has changed more than just her perspective on physics. “I truly did not understand how students could struggle with math. From my perspective, all you needed to do was show up, pay attention, and study. I didn’t understand how it was so difficult for some people,” she humbly reflects.
Experience helped Mrs. Spicer figure out her early teaching years, “But then when I began teaching at an intercity school, I witnessed first hand all of the various things that can contribute to having a difficulty understanding math, like students learning it in their second language and people who had gaps in their foundational principles for math needing help to catch up to everyone else. It made me a lot more empathic to individual situations.”
Barstow students have felt this empathy first hand. “She cultivated a joy for physics in me, so much so that Quantum Physics is now my favorite class,” explains Connor Lucido ‘24.
She emphasizes that, “Barstow is such a diverse community, and over the last decade and a half of my life I’ve been working hard to overcome these biases. Barstow has become such an accepting place to make that easier. Seeing first hand how accepting the student community is here has helped a lot. I love having that example and seeing an example of the community I hope my kids can grow up in as well.”
What’s more, Mrs. Spicer has a way of making physics a little magical. “I started to feel that physics and math were the language in which the laws of the universe are written, and that the fundamental reality that we experience is physics. Understanding physics at its most extreme levels can help us understand the human experience better,” she says.
Her class emphasizes hands-on experiences, particularly labs, even when they can get a little dicey. “I broke her bowling ball during our lab,” Lucido muses. “She wasn’t even mad at me.”
Such shenanigans are part and parcel of teaching high school, but that’s part of the fun. Mrs. Spicer explains, “I love seeing students’ reactions when they succeed at one of our challenge labs. I love those satisfactory moments where they realize that it was a lot of math and really hard but that they did it.”
Past labs, Mrs. Spicer’s tenure at Barstow has been full of good memories. Spicer explains that she loved when students ask, “completely random questions that result in taking spearmint mints to crush in my closet to see them glow,” or just as outrageous, “when a student came in a full body onesie to do the flying pig lab, which just seemed too perfectly ironic. I loved it.”
Mrs. Spicer truly goes out of her way to make her classes enjoyable. Ava Levin ‘24 recalls playing Just Dance and she appreciates how Mrs. Spicer “made sure everyone in the class understood the material we were working on.”
Mrs. Spicer appreciates the good attitude students have here at Barstow. “I love the students so much hands down,” she said of the things she’ll miss about Barstow. “Here it seems like everyone is happy to be involved in a physics class. I love that it’s so easy to get people excited through demonstrations and labs as well. I might think it’s gonna be kinda lame, but then in class everyone’s like ‘Oh wow, that’s so cool!’”
In addition to being a superstar teacher, Mrs. Spicer has become a trusted adult for many students here at Barstow. “It’s really meaningful to me to become a trusted person for a student who might not otherwise have felt comfortable talking about difficult decisions or what they’re dealing with. I didn’t know the degree to which a student’s personhood would be an intrinsic part of my job, but I love that,” she says.
We will of course miss Mrs. Spicer immensely. Her compassion, pedagogical acumen, and patience are unrivaled.
“I have been so honored to be able to teach here for the last seven years and to learn from my students and the faculty around me. I feel like it has truly made me a better person, and I’m going to be sad to leave,” Mrs. Spicer said.
Thank you so much Mrs. Spicer for everything you have done for the school and its community!
