Popular Physics Teacher Sets Off a Winning Reaction

High school physics teacher John Ball would rather lie on a bed of nails while students smash concrete blocks on his chest than give a boring lecture.

He would rather encourage his students to build an eight-foot catapult and launch a watermelon across a football field than drone on about the physics of projection.

And he would rather have his students practice shooting a toy monkey than draw diagrams explaining how a bullet curves after it is fired.

He is a physics teacher with Coke-bottle glasses, but don’t get the wrong picture: Ball is cool.

A little bit David Letterman, a little bit Mr. Wizard, Ball and his unusual experiments have made him one of the most popular teachers on the Webb Schools campus in Claremont, and recently his antics earned him national recognition.

During a teacher appreciation day ceremony Thursday, Ball, 38, was presented the Tandy Technology Scholar Award--a distinction that comes with a $2,500 check, a photo in a Time magazine ad and a trophy.

The Tandy Corp. doled out awards to the top 100 science, math and computer teachers of the 2,000 who applied, said program director Kaye Thornton.

The teachers were judged by their work in and out of the classroom, Thornton said. But in Ball’s case, there wasn’t much of a distinction.

Ball is one of the many teachers who live on the campus, where most of the students and teachers board. His free time is often filled with campus activities.

“It’s like a little cult,” Ball joked, saying that among the campus’ 300 students, gaining acceptance into an honors class such as the ones that he teaches is a difficult task. “It’s easier to become the pope.”

But the cult of John Ball is so widely revered that many of his students said they worked extra hard in biology and chemistry to earn a spot in Ball’s advanced topics or advanced placement physics classes.

And as they are cramming to make the grade to get into his classes, students are actually learning something. In the four years that Ball has taught at Webb, the school’s national science scores shot up and results on the advanced placement physics exam have almost doubled. The school took third place in the nation in the 1996 Physics Bowl and has won a host of other science awards, said David Offill, director of studies at Webb.

“The students want to learn,” Ball said, adding that the credit for the improvement should go to the students. “They’re ambitious.”

Well, that’s not what they said.

Edward Chen, 16, a sophomore in Ball’s advanced placement physics class, had no interest in the property changes of matter and energy until Ball made them come alive.

“He helps apply it to everyday life--the things you see every day but don’t understand,” Chen said. “This is, like, the only class that’s never boring.”

Indeed, students said it has been hard to work up a yawn when they are dropping eggs in student-designed boxes off a 30-foot bell tower or constructing their own holographic imaging machine. And Ball’s dry asides will wake any sleepyhead.

But Ball said the students are less interested in the shtick than in the science.

“People like a good spectacle,” he said. “Fortunately . . . nature is endlessly interesting.”

Ball’s humility is one part of his charm. His honesty is another.

“I hated physics in high school,” he admits. “I thought it was dull like everyone else, and I stayed away from it.”

But forced to take science as an English major at St. John’s College in Maryland, Ball became smitten.

“I think physics is beautiful,” he said. “You can look at a rainbow in a soap bubble and know that it’s caused by light bouncing off the soap bubble. And that it’s related to rainbows [in the sky].”

Such poetic insights flow constantly, both a throwback to his right-brain undergraduate major and a testament to his current passion for science.

“In English, we try to understand the world in a new way,” he said. “In physics, we’re still trying to understand the world in a new way, except we just use expensive toys to ask the questions.”

Knowing that teachers tend to use much of their own money to pay for their expensive toys, Tandy officials said they encourage teachers to spend their award money on themselves. But like many winners, Ball said he is going to give some of it back to the school--in a way that further bridges the gap between Ball’s scholarly interests.

“I’m going to endow a book prize for the most enthusiastic science student,” he said. “At graduation, we’ll buy [the winner] a book of [that person’s] interest.”