One would like describe North Carolina State University Visiting Professor John L. Hubisz’s recent reform efforts as a textbook example of how to combine academic scrutiny and public pressure to exact needed changes. But since Hubisz’s efforts involve ridding inaccuracies from textbooks, specifically middle-school science textbooks, that description might be confusing. Regardless, the description is apt, and the efforts are in keeping with the professor’s philosophy of responsibility in learning.
Hubisz expects his students “to be responsible adults” and “not to expect to be spoon-fed information to give back on tests.” He told Carolina Journal that students must take an active role in their own education. He even encourages students to help their peers because they also learn in the process.
“Students have to leave school with the tools necessary to continue studying on their own,” Hubisz said. “It is an impossible task to give them all the facts that they will require in a world that will be vastly different from ours.”
That understanding undergirds Hubisz’s philosophy of the teacher. “The teacher is a guide, a stimulator, and a resource, not an answer man,” he said. “When answers are given, the resources must be cited to demonstrate that they can find the answers themselves. The teacher should let the students know of his or her current interests to demonstrate that learning is a never-ending quest.”
But that quest will be effectively stymied if the oracles the learner consults, the textbooks, are breaking their implicit promise to be factual. And the effects of that broken promise will be felt the most at the middle school level. Hubisz considers middle school a crucial time in education, where opinions of science and other disciplines are shaped. “Middle school students are very hands-on, and that needs to be encouraged,” Hubisz said.
Hubisz would know. His own interest in science was nurtured by attentive teachers when he was that age. One even told him he would love calculus, ought to be a scientist, and would be a great teacher.
That pronouncement was certainly encouraging, and it could also fall under the category of prophecy. Hubisz has taught in Knoxville, Tenn., Toronto, Nova Scotia, Texas City, Texas, and Raleigh, and he has won numerous teaching awards along the way. He was nominated five times for the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor of the Year Award at College of the Mainland in Texas City, where he taught for 22 years. He has received the Robert N. Little Award for Contributions to Physics in Higher Education from the Texas Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Two years ago, the North Carolina Section of the AAPT, which he helped establish, awarded him with the first John L. Hubisz Award for outstanding service. Now Hubisz has been named the president of the AAPT.
Asked what his proudest accomplishments were, Hubisz responded not as a decorated physicist, but as a devoted teacher. His answer — in keeping with the importance he places on students’ responsibilities to learn — was the accomplishments of his students, such as “students who come back or contact me years later and tell me that they didn’t like having to do certain things when they took my class, but appreciated it and saw the importance later” and “the learning disabled students who got master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s.” Naturally, the aspect of teaching Hubisz enjoys the most is “students in all their variety.”
When Hubisz got his first opportunity to teach, he was a 17-year-old first-year college student who had already earned sophomore standing and had become the teacher of the laboratory he had just completed. He gave his prospective students a short list of questions about the lab, and if they couldn’t answer two-thirds of them, he wouldn’t allow them in the lab until they went to the library and learned what they should have known. Despite some students’ complaints, the department backed Hubisz and sent the complainers to the library.
Now Hubisz is, in effect, issuing the same challenge to the textbook manufacturers. Go to the library and learn what you ought to know as writers of textbooks, he seems to be saying, or your books won’t make it in the classroom. If the hue and row over those textbooks are any indication, the public is now backing Hubisz, too, and the manufacturers — like Hubisz’s students before them — have no alternative but to hie themselves over to the libraries to learn what they should have known already.