Rocking Science

Rocking Science

COMMUNITY

BY: CALLIE COLLINS

Geophysicist Turned Teacher Takes Education Personally

David Askey is a geophysicist, trained to explore the dynamic mysteries of the Earth’s subsurface. For a guy who loves math and science, what job could be more interesting than that?

Well, for Askey, it was standing in a classroom everyday talking to high school kids about rocketry, robotics, periodic tables and the love of physics and chemistry.

Askey says he tried to be a geophysicist once, but it just wasn’t inspiring.

“Buying a sports car and living in a nice apartment with nice furniture and eating at all the fine Dallas restaurants didn’t do it for me like I thought it would,” he said.

For him, teaching teens was far more interesting than studying rocks.

“Tutoring local kids became my focus, and I finally decided to try my hand at teaching for real,”

Askey said the never-ending challenge of changing lives has become his happy obsession for the last 34 years, and he has never looked back.

In addition to his physics and chemistry classes, he teaches rocketry, with an aerospace engineer and rocketry expert from Tinker Air Force Base, and he sponsors Norman High’s advanced robotics after school program.

Askey says teaching is what gets him up in the morning because he has a passion for inspiring kids and showing the practical side of the material.

The results are tangible, he says, pointing to his advanced robotics program, which has won the Robotics World Championship three times over the past 20 years.

Honors like world championships speak for themselves, but the atmosphere Askey has helped create at Norman High has made a difference for students.

“I sponsor ping pong tournaments, foosball tournaments, chess tournaments. My favorite time of the day is lunch. My room - the students call it ‘the 807’ - is always packed at lunch. It’s constantly full of kids working on bots, rockets, playing chess, foosball or ping pong, eating from our Physics Cantina, working on physics problems on the board, debating the controversy of the day… music is always blaring in the background. I am in my element when I’m surrounded by all that youthful energy,” said Askey. “I need it these days since I just turned 60. I’m starting to wear down, but they keep me young.”

“I spend about 75 hours a week working with students, revising my curriculum, writing and grading tests or packets or notebooks or writing recommendations,” said Askey. “I’m not complaining. Teaching is not really a job, more of a way of life.”

“I have a very patient wife. I usually bring her coffee and muffins in bed on weekends, but last year, I started meeting my students at Stella Nova coffee shop on Saturday mornings from 5:30 a.m. to noon,” Askey said. “On average, about 50 students show up off and on during the help session, but we have had up to 65 on Saturdays before a big exam. We used to meet every Saturday, but now, we just meet on the Saturdays before a test, about once every three weeks.”

This year, the group meets from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which is “more civilized,” Askey says. He noticed at a recent meet-up that students were working more at their own tables than collaborating in groups because they had access to hundreds of help videos he’s created over the years.

Askey says he’s a big fan of Generation Z, which is the latest defined demographic of the U.S. population, born between 1996 and 2010. Many people have written off high school students as lazy, tuned out, spoiled and self-centered, but Askey says that’s a misperception that bothers him.

“That is not even close to the truth,” he said. “This may turn out to be one of the greatest generations in the history of America. I get a chance to work with and talk to these future leaders of this generation every day. I read their deepest thoughts as they answer my questions in their physics journals. I interview them in front of the class during the first semester, and we have 15-minute individual back and forth sessions all through the second semester.

“Today’s leaders are the most accepting of each other, the most diverse in their interests ... the most tech savvy, the most artificially 24/7 connected ... but at the same time, they are the most vulnerable, the most depressed, medicated…. in some ways fragile, but in other ways, extremely resilient.”

Askey sees the potential for hard work that many other generations dismiss about Gen Z. “I lay on the endless homework and the daily puzzles and very difficult exams in physics and somehow, 95 percent of them voluntarily and happily come back for a second semester of ‘torture’,” Askey said. – BSM