Doctor Johnson
By: jaekeb harper
Affectionately called “Doc J.” by her students, Dr. Johnson has been a science teacher here at Phillips Exeter for over a decade. She teaches both physics and chemistry, and she serves as a dorm faculty in Lamont Hall and an advisor to Catholic Exonians. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her to talk about her journey to teaching at the Academy.
Could you tell us a bit about your work in STEM before teaching at Exeter?
So, there are two parts of my career. Before I taught at Exeter, I taught physics and chemistry at a day school- still private school- in Ohio. But before that, I was a working scientist. I got my PhD at Wash U, did some research at Harvard, and then was doing postdoctoral research at the University of California Irvine. Science goes in a variety of ways; sometimes science took a sharp left turn, but my focus always tried to be on what we call synaptic development.
So, the connections between nerve cells. The whole brain works the way it does- the whole nervous system, really- because the right cells communicate to the right other cells, and that means somehow in development they have to find each other and make just the right connections. To me that question is the question of all questions.
I ended up finishing my PhD in something completely different. We found a trophic protein. It turned out it was maybe not a trophic protein, but it was involved in a bunch of fascinating diseases. So that's what I finished my PhD in, and then I worked at UCI, literally looking at nerves. I was looking in living animals at nerves growing back after injury. I worked with goldfish. The system was a regenerating nerve system. We were hoping that regenerating nerves are following the same rules of developing nerves, so this way we didn't have to work in an embryo. Unlike you and me goldfish can regenerate after central nervous system injuries.
So I spent most of my days doing brain surgery on goldfish (they have very tiny brains!) and then they recover for certain amount of time depending what the experiment was, then we inject them with what we call vital dye, which is a dye that does not kill the cell it's in. Then, we had this huge contraption of a microscope with a special cooling system, and you cut the skull open, you put the fish in a special system for little artificial respiration, which just means putting oxygenated water through the gills. [There were l]ittle, tiny fish with a big microscope looking down at its brain, and [I was] then tracking- finding one of the dyed neurons and following it for eight hours to see what it would do. I spent a lot of time in the dark.
What drew you to education?
That one's an easy one. Easy yet fascinating. So there I was, being a neurobiologist for 10 years. Neurobiology tends to be a younger field than some of the others- the word itself was only invented in 1980. It's a young field, which also meant it ended up being kind of a politically active field. Part of that is the youth of the people who are doing the research, and part was also that during the 80s when the animal rights movement started blowing up, neurology couldn't ignore it the way genetics or biochemistry could. They could say "we're just working in a dish." Neurology is working on animals. Therefore, when PETA said "working on animals is a horrible thing to do" we had to respond.
We discovered that PETA was going into third and sixth grade classes and saying "scientists are horrible, look at the mouse," so at the Society for Neuroscience, the grad students and postdocs got together and said, "okay, we should go into schools." And so there was a whole network of us across the national meetings which started going into sixth grade classes. You'd contact your local sixth grade teacher and say: "I would love to come in to talk about what neurobiology research is." We didn't even put it in terms of animal research. That was necessarily saying "This research requires animals."
We discovered right away that, first of all, teachers love when scientists come in and kids love talking about it, especially when we brought actual brains. They were always like "oooh can I touch it?" My favorite question I would get from sixth-graders is "what's the yuckiest things you've ever touched?" Sixth graders are amazing little people. But, we quickly discovered that, right away, it stopped being about animal research almost instantly and started being about scientific thinking. What we discovered as we visited middle schools and high schools is that neither students nor teachers had a very good idea of what science research really is. They seem to think there were facts and you try to prove your facts right and all kinds of things that we're like, "oh, no, that’s not how it goes." And so, it quickly became a movement that was much more about teaching elementary, middle school, and high school kids what science research really is, and it got me much more involved in teaching scientific thinking that, by the time I finished off my postdoc, I was trying to decide whether to do another postdoc research and aim toward being a university Professor or whether this whole education thing is more important. Improving the teaching of scientific thinking was more important than any research I would do, and that's when I applied for teaching jobs.
What drew you to teaching at Exeter specifically?
Two things. So, I definitely knew I wanted to teach high school because at that point, students are old enough to get into some of the more abstract thinking ideas, but by the time kids arrived at college, they've already separate into two groups: those were going to go on to major in science, and those who think science is hard and will never touch it. Most colleges even have separate electives for people who are not science majors. They're called "rocks for jocks." There's a variety of nicknames like that. So, by the time people enter college, they've already either decided "science is for me" or "I hate science, and I can't do it." That made me realize that high school was the right level.
I was going to teach at Hawken for three or four years. I kind of loved it so much, I stayed for ten. But I knew, because I myself went to a boarding school, I was interested in teaching in boarding schools. I knew that if I taught at a more prestigious high school, I might have greater effects when I go present at the Critical Thinking Foundation conference, for example. I'd be able to reach more teachers. I wouldn’t really have applied for the job at Exeter. I didn't think I even wanted this job, but they were the first ones to contact me and I said “All right, I know I would never want to teach here because I'm actually an Alum. I went here, like, why would I want to teach my alma mater? Therefore, it would be a good practice interview. So, it's okay if I'm nervous and screw this one up.”
I was nervous. I had to interview with a lot of our people and I'm like “it's okay if I don't get the job-- I didn't want it anyway, so I don't have to be nervous,” and then they called and offered me the job and I was like, “huh? Can I have a day to think about it?”
I remember talking with my dad that evening. “So I got a call from this man, Mr. Saltman, who thinks that Exeter would like to give me a job.” He's like: “Great, you’re gonna take it, right?” “Well, no. I never said I was going to teach there. I've got 36 other schools that, you know, are contacting me. I probably should be studying, taking more interviews-” And my dad said, “Yeah, but you’re gonna take the job at Exeter,” and I kept giving these reasons why no, no, I’m not. He would say, “Yeah, but you can take this job.” He's like “I talked to you after you came back that interview. You really like the people there; you really were happy there.”
That's part of the reason I love this job: I love the people at the school. I wanted to stick with a place that would let me be experimental-- that would let me go to conferences and talk to other teachers about teaching scientific thinking. I came to Exeter. The reason I picked this over the other possibilities was I love the people I work with in the department and I love the students. They just make the place for me.