Mr. Swartz and Mr. Dunn are both science based teachers at Carterville High School. Their teaching styles are quite different.
Mr. Swartz has been teaching for 17 years in total. He has only been at Carterville High School for 7 years. He didn’t always want to be a teacher though. He went into college studying Physics for engineering, but he says, “[In] teaching, specifically, I wanted to do something meaningful where I was helping people.”
Mr. Swartz loves to teach Physics over all other classes. He taught AP Physics at other schools as well, but just regular Physics in Carterville. In his Physics class, he mentions his favorite lesson is teaching students electricity. This unit is his favorite because of the fun part of getting to shock everyone with a tesla coil.
His favorite part in teaching in general is when he hands out personalized letters to students. This he does in every class. He says his first year of teaching he had always gotten the question of where they would be using any of this stuff in the real world, and it got him thinking. He wanted to be able to have students take something out of his class into the real world, and educating students on good character and life lessons seemed very important to him. Mr. Swartz said, “I got the idea from a book called the last lecture. I wanted to give people something specific other than just a talk about life. This is probably my most impactful lesson and most important.”
He has always tried his best to make that impact on his students and make sure they are taking something from his class that they can for sure use in their lives.
Mr. Dunn also makes a lot of impact on students. He has a few differences in how he does so. Mr. Dunn has been teaching for 13 years, and 9 here at Carterville.
He also didn’t always want to be a teacher. He started out wanting to go into nursing or some sort of electrical work. The thing that changed Mr. Dunn’s mind was having so many bad teachers, but one good one. He wanted to make an impact just like that one good teacher, and try his best to make less of any bad teachers from his past. Helping people in the way of teaching is something he loves, which is why if asked what his dream job would be, it is again some sort of way to help people such as rebuilding houses. Another one of his passions that isn’t really talked about for him is how he loves to fix things by himself, and he loves running and biking.
Mr. Dunn takes a lot of passion in his teaching as well as his others. He says his favorite lesson to teach is, “The macromolecules lecture in Adv Bio. That was the lesson I did to get my job here.”
As well as his favorite lesson, his favorite class to teach is Anatomy because of how technical it is with lots of terminology and how fast paced it is. This goes a lot with his teaching style as he says it is, “Laid back but fast paced. It really matters to me that people try. A bit perfectionist.”
Both teachers show that they truly love to help people and that is why they chose this job, and even though their teaching styles are quite different, they both have the same end goal.
