June 2026: Andrew Young

About Andrew

Towards the end of my time at graduate school, I had several in-depth conversations with my advisor regarding the next steps in my career. One of the things he highlighted was the skillset I had accrued over the last several years. He suggested that I should leverage my strengths towards a teaching career. From that conversation, I found that teaching is a wonderful fit for my desire to help the next generation of STEM majors.

I wanted to be part of a community with a shared vision for improving physics education and outreach. To be a more effective educator, it helps to learn from colleagues across the nation. Their varied perspectives offer different opportunities to engage in new ideas I might not have thought of on my own.

I have been an AAPT member since 2004. I live in the least populous state in the union. We have only a few community colleges, and only one 4-year university. The opportunity to interact with teaching colleagues is minimal at best and hampered by a commute length of over 100 miles. The internet, while a great resource, consumes a lot of mental bandwidth to search for, parse, and process the many ideas out there. AAPT offers good literature (through Physics Today and The Physics Teacher) that disseminates great ideas. The webinars offered through AAPT have pertinent information from both the teaching and research worlds. Finally, the online community meetings offer a touch point where we can gather and share stories from the academic world. I continue to be amazed by the many common issues we all face as educators, regardless of location.

I attended the Winter AAPT meeting in 2007. It was there that I first learned about an online homework system offered by one of the textbook publishers. It seemed like a novel idea, but I was still employing the classic homework methodology: Assign homework from the textbook, receive large quantities of completed homework assignments at the end of the week, spend the next week grading them at top speed, and hand them back to the students just in time to receive the next batch of homework assignments. At the community college level, we do not necessarily have a graduate or undergraduate labor force to grade these assignments, so they were all hand-graded by me. A couple of years later, I would start using online homework systems and found them to be both a game-changer and a force multiplier. I used the online homework system for my live classes, but over the next several years, it afforded me the opportunity to start converting my live classes into an online format. This was rather fortuitous, for when the COVID shutdown hit our campus, our physics department already had a template in place to automatically convert the live-class format to an online one. We were ready to provide academic continuity in a time when basic operations had ceased or were upended around the world.

There has been a lot of talk about AI and its place in education. It is a very hot-button issue that seems to polarize a lot of people. I have adopted a wait-and-see approach, as I do not want to summarily dismiss a new technology off-hand. In my live physics lecture, I always include numerous examples for my students to work on to reinforce a recently learned lesson or topic. One of my students took the time to show me that by taking a snapshot of my PowerPoint lecture and feeding it to AI, they could get both the process for solving the problem and the correct answer that follows. And here I am, asking AI silly questions like: Who would win in a fight: Homelander, or the Sentinels from X-Men: Days of Future Past (AI says the answer is: Sentinels). Is AI something to fight against, or dedicate more time to anti-cheating methods? Should it/can it be leveraged properly in the academic environment?

I like helping my students achieve understanding and mastery. I want my students to succeed, and it is great to see their learning matrix integrate new physics material. But more importantly, it is wonderful to see them think about complex content in a different way, in a manner that they had not utilized before. This is the biggest joy I can get from the time I spend with my students.