Mike Mitchell, a physics teacher at St. Luke's School, does a demonstration in class.

Photo Credit: Contributed

Mike Mitchell, right, says he enjoys working with students.

Photo Credit: Melvin Mason

Mike Mitchell wants his science students to do more than just “solve for X.”

“I look at a building, but I see through the walls and see what holds it up,” said Mitchell, a physics teacher at St. Luke’s School. “I keep that wonder of a child and explain how it works. It’s much more interesting that solving an equation. For me, it’s about the application, and I’m fortunate enough that I learned this as an engineer.”

Mitchell, in his fourth year of teaching physics at St. Luke’s, says he finds joy working with and learning with his students about how things work. But he wasn’t always interested in becoming a teacher. He was introduced to it during the summer of 2003, in between his junior and senior years at Manhattan College in the Bronx, N.Y.

The native of Morgantown, Pa., said he did not want to go home and instead worked at a lab in a summer program at the Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He offered to alternate lab work with teaching. There, he discovered a love for educating others about what fascinates him in engineering. “It was really neat when I did the summer program to share with others subjects I was really passionate about,” he said. “They were really curious about how things worked. I tried to explain how things work and make sense of it all.”

Mitchell’s interest in teaching stayed with him after graduating from Manhattan in 2004 and finishing his master’s degree at Columbia University the following year. He taught for two years at the Bronx Engineering and Technical Academy before moving to St. Luke’s in 2007.

Though he’s in front of a classroom now, Mitchell says he still loves to learn and tries to impress his wonder of engineering and physics on his students.  “I joke with the kids that I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up."

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