The faculty in the science department at Brother Martin has a combined 100 + years of teaching experience, many at Brother Martin, other Catholic schools, and also at the University level. Those 100 + years helps the science department meet the needs of our students. The science department is currently planning for the 2017-2018 school year. One way we are meeting the needs of our changing world is by requiring all seniors to take a year of physics, making our students more competitive in the college arena.
Hands-on experience in a science classroom is valuable to the learner to actually “see” what they are learning. Keeping this in mind, the Brother Martin science department has been busy preparing our students for their future science class at Brother Martin and in college. Our various science classes have worked on 55 individual labs across the science curriculum. Our labs have included slide preparation and gene pool studies in biology, calculating velocity/acceleration in physics, fingerprinting and crime scene preparation in forensics, friction and density labs in physical science, geodes and making clouds in a jar in earth science, and making silver ornaments for Christmas and learning how to do a filtration in chemistry. In addition to labs, our students are also participate in teacher-lead demos, such as making a carbon column in chemistry ap, watching sodium metal reactive with water in chemistry, learning about the human skeleton in anatomy & physiology, and learning about gravity in all the physics classrooms.
A long-time science department member, Dr. Raymond Fricken ’55 SA, passed away this January. Dr. Fricken was a former deputy director of the Division of High Energy Physics for the U.S. Department of Energy and the executive officer of the department’s Superconducting Super Collider Division. In his retirement, Dr. Fricken became a devoted member of the Brother Martin High School family and a dedicated volunteer who worked with ap physics and calculus students for more than 20 years. His contributions to the physics department were invaluable, and he is definitely a loss for our department and for our students. We are so grateful for his years of dedicated service to the Brother Martin science department.
