Van Nuys : Physics Teacher Gets to the Heart of Matter

Grant High School’s Fred Carrington is anything but a lackluster teacher.

Jumping around his physics laboratory, shooting off air-compression rockets, making bad puns and pecking students on the forehead--instead of yelling--when they (rarely) doze off, Carrington is smitten with both teaching and students.

For his obvious amor, Carrington, 58, recently became one of 60 teachers honored in a series of Disney Channel video profiles. That makes him a contender for one of 36 honored spots on “The Walt Disney Company and McDonald’s Present the American Teacher Awards” in December.

His secret: helping students really understand “the deep, dark, hard parts” of physics. The method: lots of projects. In Carrington’s classes, students can expect to build their own water rocket, musical instrument and camera.

“Most students aren’t able to understand a physics book” just by reading it, he said. “It’s like a different language to them, so you have to interpret it and show it to them so they can understand.”

And understand they do. Just this past weekend, Carrington reunited with a former student, the daughter of a fry cook. She’s on her way to UC Berkeley, he bragged, to pursue a doctorate in physics.

A Reseda resident, Carrington came to teaching physics in a roundabout way. A woodwind musician by trade, he began subbing to get through tough financial times. In so doing, he found his true calling.

Thirty years ago, he took a job teaching math at Grant. When the school’s physics teacher retired in the late 1970s, Carrington took over. “Physics is like math with toys for me,” he joked. “It’s like they pay you to play.”

In early fall, Carrington will learn if he is among the 36 teachers who made the cut for the awards show. The Outstanding Teacher of 1996, who will receive a $25,000 honorarium, will be announced Dec. 8 on the Disney Channel’s telecast from the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. The winning teacher’s school also will receive $25,000, and the school district gets $10,000.