New Teacher Spotlight: Mr. Schiller

Crier: What are your hobbies?

Schiller: I like learning new languages; I think that’s really exciting. I speak Spanish and I’m trying to learn French and Korean right now. I really should stick with one because learning two is too much. I [also] like reading a lot—science fiction books. Obviously, I’m a science teacher. Also just being outside—like camping. I love camping. There’s this place in Wisconsin called Point Beach State Park that is right on Lake Michigan, that’s my favorite.

Crier: Why did you become a physics teacher?

Schiller: When I took physics in high school, I was failing at first and I hated it. My teacher totally turned it around and she made it so interesting. After I met and talked with her, I was like “oh my gosh this is so cool!” I like being able to understand why everything happens in the world and I get a lot of joy from getting to share that with other people. It’s fun getting to do physics, but my favorite part is getting to share it with students. And then seeing when my students are like “oh my gosh, that is cool” and I’m like “isn’t it so cool?!” So it’s just the mutual excitement; it makes me so happy.

Crier: If you weren’t a teacher, what would you be? 

Schiller: I would probably like to work for—obviously I would love to work for NASA. Would I get in? Maybe not. I would try to though. [If I didn’t make it, I would want to work] for some astronautics company.

Crier: What has been one of your favorite things about teaching at Conant so far? 

Schiller: It’s going to be really cheesy, but I love the students at Conant. The students, the staff, everybody here. Physics is great, but what makes me excited to be here is all the students because they get to share things about themselves and learn about physics together, that’s my favorite part.

Crier: What’s your weird/fun lab story?

Schiller: The Millikan oil drop experiment it’s where you measure the charge of an electron. We were doing that in a class and it was a three day lab. Where we were taking data and putting it in the spreadsheet and my lab partner deleted all of the data, all of our three days worth of data. So we’re frantically making up numbers in the chart. We got our percent error within 0.1% and our professor was like “you guys did a really great job.” So that was a really scary experience, but also really funny now looking back at it. The lab was cool, but be careful with your fingers when you highlight things.

Crier: What has been your favorite non-science class? 

Schiller: I took this one class called Survey of World Music, and we got to learn about what makes music special in different parts of the world. We just got to listen to different types of music and instruments from literally every region in the world and it was so interesting also because like half the class we would just sit there and eat their breakfast, and our professor would like play a video for 10 minutes of music and we would listen [and she would] be like “do you see this instrument?” and we were like “mhm”. It was really interesting.

Crier: What is one thing you hope students will take away from your class?

Schiller: My biggest hope is that [when] leaving class, I would love everyone to know physics, but I would love everyone to not be afraid to try something difficult and fail at it. I always tell everybody that I want them to fail, not in the sense that I want everyone to leave this class with an F, but I want everyone to like fail at something to see that it’s okay and then try it differently because that’s what science is about. If there’s one thing I would want my students to know [when they leave] it’s that it’s okay if you fail; you’re supposed to, and that’s what’s gonna help you move forward in life.

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