Joe P. Meyer

Joe P. Meyer was an exciting and vital teacher. He never ceased in his search for new ways to present physics to his students so that they could experience the excitement of true learning.

A graduate of Eastern Illinois University,  Meyer earned his M.Ed. from the University of Illinois, and continued his graduate studies. He began his high school teaching career in the small central Illinois town of Tuscola in 1958. He was a chemistry teacher by training, but since it was a small school, he also taught physics. When Meyer moved on to Oak Park-River Forest High School in 1964, he taught physics full time. It was then that he realized that he was really a born physics teacher. He still retained some interest in chemistry, however, and set up a three-period-a-day combined physics-chemistry course for which he received an AAPT Innovative Physics Teaching Award in 1970.

During his first years in Oak Park, he met Harald Jensen of Lake Forest College and was impressed by the phenomenological approach to teaching physics that Harald advocated. He also became more involved in sharing his knowledge and skills with other physics teachers. During the early 1970s he joined the staff of Earl Zwicker’s NSF Summer Institutes at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). These Institutes were set up for high school physics teachers and were taught by fellow high school physics teachers except for Earl himself, who was the motivation behind the project.   A good portion of the time was spent in the shop, building lab and demonstration equipment which would be taken to the home school and used there. Meyer was responsible for the shop portion of the class. He was the perfect choice for this assignment since he had built most of his own lab equipment, much of it in the basement of his home. In fact, Meyer’s hobby was building -physics apparatus. His basement was a very well-equipped shop. Air tracks, collision-in-two-dimensions apparatus, ballistic pendulums, and a calculator timer are just a few of the items which he engineered and build in his basement. In addition to the Institutes at IIT, Meyer also shared his apparatus-building talents at summer institutes at DePaul University and at apparatus workshops conducted during various AAPT meetings.

Meyer was active in the Chicago section of AAPT and served as president of that organization in 1970-71. He was also involved with the Illinois State Physics Project (ISPP), a spin-off of the NSF Summer Institute at IIT. He and others from the ISPP group gave presentations at section meetings outside the Chicago area demonstrating the phenomenological approach to teaching physics.

With the advent of the microprocessor, Meyer’s hobby evolved to applications of the computer to physics teaching. His home welcomed the addition of a Commodore PET and he spent many hours developing programs that would be useful in the physics laboratory. Later he conducted microcomputer workshops at the Stevens Point and the San Francisco AAPT meetings.

His success as a teacher was highlighted in the September 1983 issue of Physics Today. Featured in the article were successful high school physics programs. While physics enrollments in many high schools had been declining, the program at Oak Park-River Forest High School continued to thrive. Students taking the Advanced Placement physics course did very well on the AP Examination. In addition, his students competed with marked success in physics-related contests such at the JETS competition, Westinghouse Science Talent Search, Space Shuttle Project and the Duracell battery contest.

Meyer had a wide range of Association-related experiences from presenting workshops at AAPT meetings to serving on the Executive Board (1972-75). By the time he was elected to the Presidential Chain in 1982 he was very familiar with the operations and the needs of AAPT and served as Vice president, President Elect, AAPT President, and Past president until 1986.

Meyer’s contributions to the physics teaching community were legion. He served as a member of NSF panels reviewing the implementation of pre-college instruction and curricular programs, and he presented papers and demonstrations for a variety of teacher organizations both in Illinois and elsewhere. As a member of AAPT, he was always ready to help in any capacity. He was a member of the Executive Board, President of the Chicago Section, and Chairman of the Task Force on Standards for Teaching Loads for High School teachers in the United States and received NSTA’s Science Teacher Achievement Recognition Star Award. In 1971, he received AAPT’s Carnegie Award for innovative teaching.

In 1977 he was presented the Distinguished Service Citation for his many contributions to the teaching of physics, for his concern for the operation of AAPT, and for his work on the development of better standards for pre-college teachers of physics. In 2014 he was honored as part of the inaugural cohort of AAPT Fellows.

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