Zach Brenneman ’10
“My dad builds houses. He used to bring his broken tools home and let us take them apart.”
Zach Brenneman ’10 is thinking back on the childhood that inspired him to study physics. He remembers playing around at his dad’s construction sites in Kalispell, Montana, and when in his early teens he started helping out.
“I got interested in building things and playing with LEGOs. That led to an interest in how stuff works. How do I put a roof on my LEGO tower without everything falling down?”
As a student-teacher at Seattle’s Ingraham High School, Brenneman now proposes scenarios like that for his students to ponder. They gather in groups around small tables and come up with solutions for problems, learning to think like physicists.
Brenneman, currently enrolled in the SPU School of Education’s Alternative Routes to Certification program, is one of seven SPU physics students benefitting from $105,000 in PhysTEC Noyce Scholarships for 2010-11. Assistant Professor of Physics Hunter Close and Associate Professor of Physics Lane Seeley helped secure the funding, which supports students who aim to be certified to teach physics and who commit to teach for two years in a “high need” school district after graduation.
The PhysTEC Noyce Scholarships will provide Brenneman, as well as Kimberley Barnes, Jordan Lance, Heidi Rowles, Marcus Tubbs, John Weisenfeld, and Beth Williams, up to $15,000 toward tuition and other expenses this year.
All of them will eventually help meet the needs of high school students who are taking physics classes in growing numbers at the same that there is a shortage in physics teachers. “Future physics teachers from SPU are specially prepared to see scientific thinking from the student’s point of view,” says Close.
Brenneman loves kindling his students’ curiosity. “Here, physics is a course that students choose to take. These students want to learn.”
Alumni, Students
