Winners KY 2006

Jeffrey A. Wright
Louisville Male Traditional High School
Louisville, Kentucky

Jeffrey Wright will do just about anything to make his students excited about physics. To demonstrate pressure and conservation of momentum, he lies down on a bed of nails and has a student break a concrete block on his chest with a sledgehammer. But Wright adds, “My creativity in the classroom is not as important as allowing my students to use theirs.” And so he assigns them to design a cannon that will fire a potato through the goalposts from the far end of the football field, to make a hovercraft that can float the biggest kid in the class down the hallway, and to trace the path of the bullet that hit John F. Kennedy by dissecting a Zapruder film. These and dozens of other hands-on ideas helped Wright, a fifteen-year veteran who teaches ninth through twelfth grades, win a 2006 National Teacher of the Year nomination.

 
 

Glenn E. Zwanzig, Jr.
duPont Manual High School
Louisville, Kentucky

Glenn “Skip” Zwanzig’s classroom knows no walls. When he received a grant to study in Antarctica for six weeks, Zwanzig brought his students with him via constant Internet communication. “I push my students beyond the normal classroom,” says Zwanzig, who for sixteen years has been presenting biology and chemistry in unconventional ways at Dupont Manual High School. Zwanzig has been known to drop spiders from the ceiling on Halloween; his classroom is filled with robotic hamsters, funny hats, and tanks brimming with small aquatic organisms. Yet his coursework is challenging; his ninth grade biology students learn the same curriculum as college freshmen.