Room 202, the Physics room, is cluttered with interesting stuff. Electric sensors, weights, and other lab equipment sit on the tables, and intricate formulas adorn the walls. Every day, students in this room struggle to grasp the concepts of friction and mass, and pick up bits of wisdom imparted by their teacher.

Dr. Richard Piccioni has been teaching Physics at Garfield for three years, and his curly red hair and cheerful grin are a familiar sight around the school. If you ask him what he does in his spare time, he’ll tell you that he’s learning to play harpsichord and that his ultimate goal is to memorize all 15 of Bach’s two-part inventions for the instrument.

“I needed something to do that was creative and fun,” he said. We know him as the brilliant, slightly eccentric wizard who can explain the science of falling objects and Newton’s third law, but before he came here, he spent years trying out different jobs.

Dr. P (as he is affectionately called by his students) has become an essential part of Garfield, but he didn’t come here full-time until the fall of 2000. He has taught Biology, Biochemistry, Biophysics and Chemistry to college students, worked on Wall Street and has practiced law. And because of his father’s work as an experimental physicist, he got to grow up in all different parts of the world.

“We would bounce around from place to place every year,” he explained. However, he attended high school in a “very white” upscale neighborhood north of San Diego, which he said was “a very different experience [from Garfield] – more like Mercer Island.”

Things started after high school, when he went to college and embarked upon a succession of different careers. Dr. P attended UC Irvine when it was “very new, very small, and very strange,” as he puts it. After graduating in 1972 with a degree in Biology, he did research for three years and then became a professor, teaching at Hunter College in New York City. Unfortunately, the college didn’t consider his research productive enough, and he was denied tenure and had to leave. His next job was as a systems analyst on Wall Street, working with computers. That wasn’t really his dream career though, so after a few years he went to law school, hoping to find a career that suited him.

“I became a lawyer because I was an environmental activist,” Dr. P said, “and I thought I could be more effective if I had a law degree.” He was hoping to make a living as an environmental activist and for nine years he worked on cases, prosecuting tobacco companies and polluters. However, he realized “after having sort of been around the block a few times,” that he would do the environment more good as a scientist.

His work in that field led him to Garfield, where he was a student teacher for Mr. Kunselman and Ms. Jacklet, and then came on board as a full-time teacher three years ago. Just this year, he took on the project of adding two periods of calculus-based Physics to the curriculum.

The road to becoming a Physics teacher was not without obstacles. “When I was in high school and college the only thing I cared about was grades,” Dr. P said. “It took me a long time to get away from that.”

He was helped by his role models, which included his father, a professor in law school who was a master of the Socratic method of teaching, and his thesis adviser, who he describes as being “an excellent scientist, somebody who knew about many different areas of science and tried to bring them together.”

This seems to be an especially appropriate influence, as it was indeed his love of science that brought him to Garfield. “When I came here,” said Dr. P, “I saw how beautifully diverse the student body was.” His own high school experience was lacking in the racial and socioeconomic diversity that we are so proud of at Garfield. That, along with the fact that he knew parents who sent their children to Garfield, helped him make the decision that this was where he wanted to teach.

He was attracted to the school for many reasons, but now, after having taught here for three years, he thinks the students and parents that he meets are his favorite aspect of the school.

“[They are] what makes this place good,” he said. That may be true — but Garfield wouldn’t exist without wonderful teachers, and Dr. P is certainly one of those. Let’s hope he continues to teach us about the mysteries of Physics for many years to come.