Anna McLean Phillips's Homepage

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I am currently a physics teacher at Durham Academy's upper school. I teach sophomore level introductory physics to a bunch of excited, fun kids. Next year, I'll also be teaching electives in Astronomy and Engineering. I graduated from Swarthmore College where I majored in physics and minored in mathematics and educational studies. After completing my undergraduate degree in three years, I took a semester to work part time continuing research that I had begun the past summer.  I also volunteered with the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants: Raleigh, teaching an ESL course twice a week to adult refugees. In the spring of 2007, I completed Swarthmore's 9th semester teacher certification program at Ridley High School in Folsom, PA, working towards my teaching certificate in high school physics. I currently have a North Carolina Standard Professional I License in the areas of Mathematics (grades 9-12) and Physics (grades 9-12) as well as a Pennsylvania teaching certificate in the area of Physics (6-12). My academic interests are largely centered on teaching and learning physics and math, and I am currently hoping to attend graduate school in physics at some point in the next few years. I intend to teach high school physics and/or math until then and to continue teaching in some capacity after finishing a degree.  I'm also interested in exploring how gender, race, and language effect how individuals learn math and science. I have only just recently stepped back from working extensively with education-based nonprofits. In California, I was a member of the pilot program of the Future Leaders Institute (FLI), and over the subsequent summer, I worked to completely redesign the program curriculum. I continued to work with the organization for several years, fund raising, speaking at events, and helping with a variety of management tasks. When I ended up at Swarthmore, I got involved with Village Education Project. Again, I worked in a management and curriculum design role. In the summer of 2008, the math and English curricula I wrote were implemented for the first time. I had the good luck to volunteer with the program in Ecuador for a month of that summer, and had a great deal of fun learning from and teaching my students. (If you ever get a chance to visit Otavalo, do. It's possibly my favorite town in the world.)

I'm from Northern California and am  a product of the Athenian School, an independent school. You can contact me at AnnaPhillips AT gmail DOT com   or   Aphilli1 AT swarthmore DOT edu . And, do please note that googling "Anna Phillips" and "Anna M. Phillips" will give you many, many results that have to do with at least a hundred other Anna Phillipses. I have received enough misdirected email to know that I do not want to be mistaken for some of them.