Chem teacher of year proves science lives outside the lab
If the thoughts of lab goggles, balancing equations and an oversized periodic table create chemistry PTSD in you, you’re not alone.
You’re also not a student of Ryan Johnson M.S. ’18, who was named 2022 Chemistry Teacher of the Year by the American Association of Chemistry Teachers. While that may seem like a title reserved for the nerdiest of STEM educators, Johnson is anything but. He is a backpacker, rock climber and dog lover who is passionate about chemistry.
Matt Miller, head of the chemistry department at SDSU, said, “Ryan is one of those unique individuals who not only looks for better things, but wants change by implementing these ideas. Ryan may or may not have needed our program, but he caused the program to be better for everyone because of his presence.
“His excitement for chemistry and passion for teaching was immediately felt by everyone and the conversations and sharing that occurred impacted not only his classroom, but those of the other teachers, including my classroom here at SDSU.”
Johnson also shared that excitement with a reporter from the Gazette-Telegraph in Colorado Springs, where he lives and teaches.
“I think everybody, no matter what your walk of life is, is impacted by chemistry. Whether it’s the weather outside, the food we eat, the textures we experience, the rocks we walk on as we hike down a Colorado trail—it’s all chemistry.”
Johnson teaches 10th, 11th and 12th graders at Doherty High School, everything from intro to advanced placement classes as well as being an adjunct instructor for general and organic chemistry at Pikes Peak Community College.
“I believe chemistry is for everyone,” Johnson said in a September 2021 TED talk in nearby Manitou Springs. But he also acknowledges that “I’m not just facing a classroom of students every day. I’m facing generations of chemistry PTSD … So I wanted to figure out how do I address this chemphobia, this fear of science.”
Science on the trail
He found the answer in a summer 2021 thru-hike of the Colorado Trail and a bottle of Diet Coke.
After teaching through the pandemic, instructing students by videoconferencing and demonstrating chemical reactions from his dining room, summer 2021 “was the perfect opportunity to experience nature,” he told his TED talk listeners. But Johnson didn’t just want to get away with his dog, Kuiper. He had science on both his mind and his back.
After earlier conducting the well-known Diet Coke and Mentos experiment at thousand-foot intervals on Pikes Peak, he asked himself, “How could I engage people with chemistry outside? I realized the answer was staring me in the face. Enter the Colorado Trail … I had long been obsessed with thru-hiking the Colorado Trail,” he said in his TED talk.
That is 486 miles through 12 mountain passes and eight wilderness areas in some of Colorado’s most rugged terrain, Johnson said.
Hike produced lessons for students
He made the 35-day trek not only with 40 pounds of camping gear and food, he also had a backpack with 10 pounds of chemistry equipment. “I planned 12 chemistry experiments that could be done on the trail.” They included analyzing the effects of sunscreen on ultraviolet rays (“Does that generic product work just as well?”), looking at geology and geochemistry, how water filtration works, the effects of altitude on self-inflating balloons and, of course, Diet Coke and Mentos.
Other thru-hikers nicknamed him “the professor,” but it wasn’t just fellow backpackers who were impressed with his experiments, so were his students.
He took the results to the classroom to give his students something tangible to model and grasp rather than abstract concepts. Johnson also took advance placement classes into the mountains on a Saturday or a school-day field trip to conduct their own outdoor experiments. “Students have loved all the chemistry-on-the-trails experiences I have shared with them.”
Concluding his TED talk, Johnson said, “I hope someday a student says ‘chemistry is too hard for me.’ I will look them straight in the eye and say, ‘Go take a hike.’”
SDSU’s unique hybrid master’s program
For Johnson, it was a bit of a hike for him to come to SDSU to earn his master’s degree. He credits SDSU chemistry professor Matt Miller, whom he met at a chemistry conference in Colorado.
Since 2008, SDSU has been offering a two-year, 32-credit chemical education specialization designed for K-12 science teachers. Online courses cover 22 credits with on-campus research spread over two summers covering the remaining credits. Students are only on campus for two to three weeks per summer, so that fit well with his family situation, Johnson said.
His cohort of 22 became almost like family. “The chemistry department was very welcoming … (and the teachers) fostered a tightknit personality,” he said.
Building on the ooh-ah moment
This summer he gave a 20-minute presentation at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education at Purdue University with Miller and fellow SDSU chemistry faculty member Melody Jewell on chemical education modeling, taking challenging concepts and allowing students to model them either via computer or physically.
It was at that same biennial conference where he was recognized before almost 1,000 of his peers as 2022 Chemistry Teacher of the Year.
The key to teaching science, he said, is performing experiments that get “people really excited and then you can use that excitement to ask them questions; using that ooh-ah moment to ask follow-up questions. If I had a dollar for every time my students ask, ‘Are we going to blow something up today?’, I could retire.
“But using those exciting demonstrations to start students thinking and developing their own experiments—that’s where the real scientific learning happens.”
Dave Graves
Visit https://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_johnson_chem_on_the_trails_the_mountains_experiential_stem_learning to watch Johnson’s 2021 Ted Talk.
