A Talk With Kent Wallace: Physics Professor, Rocket Team Coach, Talk Show Host and More [People Issue 2016]

Kent Wallace might be one of the busiest human beings on the planet. On the morning I interviewed him for a profile in our 2016 People Issue, he was due on a conference call about an application for a grant from the National Science Foundation. The project, a joint effort of teachers at three area universities and the Martha O'Bryan Center, involves after-school programs that teach computer coding to middle-school girls and assessing the impact on their math and science learning.

The night before, he had the bi-weekly meeting of the Fisk Altitude Achievement Missile Team. The student group he leads (which he co-founded 10 years ago with visiting professor and NASA scientist Rudy Gostowski) was making final tweaks to its rocket design for NASA's Student Launch competition. Two weeks later, their first full-scale test launch of the 10-foot-tall rocket they'd fabricated from scratch was a big success, hauling its payload of scientific instruments just over one mile above a sod farm in Manchester. (The national launch day for the NASA contest is April 16, outside Huntsville, Ala.) 

Earlier in the week, he'd previewed the first trailer for Science You!, a talk show-style TV program celebrating motivated science students and teachers, for which he'd filmed a pilot back in January.

Although I wouldn't have blamed him for being a bit tired when we me, he was brimming with contagious enthusiasm instead, with far more to say about students and teaching than we could possibly fit in the paper. Read more of our conversation after the jump.

Country Life: Where did the idea to host a talk show about science students come from?

Kent Wallace: After years of doing the outreach and trying to affect underserved populations in math-intensive curricula and stuff like that, I started realizing, "Gee, we make traditional celebrities, your singers, actors, athletes and what have you, but there are these kids that are doing some incredible things, and I want to tell the world about it."

I collaborate with a colleague of mine, a gentleman by the name of Vando Rogers in the art department, and one day he said, "Kent, I have a crazy idea for you. What about a talk show where we highlight some of those kids you work with?" We were starting to brainstorm and what we thought was, you have talk shows at night where you’ll see that actor or athlete and what have you, and they are a celebrity, but think about these kids who are in the classrooms. There’s some of them who are very exceptional, and there’s sometimes these heartbreaking experiences that I hear about.

When I was in graduate school, a young lady who was in my class had been a teacher in one of the urban schools up north. She was telling me about a young man who came up to her and said "Hey, would you do me a favor? Would you put an F on my paper the next time you hand it back?" She said "Why would you want an F? You got an A." And she tells me that he said "The A is cool and you can put it in your gradebook, but I don’t want the other kids to see that I got an A. They’ll start making fun of me and then I won’t fit in."

And that crushed me. I get it. I was in school once. I know that pressure, but I never heard of it to that level, where I’d rather the kids think I’m a failing student so that I can fit in rather than them being proud of me or celebrating the fact that I’m doing well in school.

When I heard that story, the more I noticed instances that existed like that. That’s a culture thing. I don’t mean like an ethnic culture, but more like the culture or the climate of a given school. As we’re hashing out ideas, I thought "What if there was something that could change the perceptions, the culture of what it means to be a high performer in school — that it would be something that you would want to be known for, rather than something that you would dissuade for the sake of just fitting in with everyone." If you change that perception, then more kids would be like "I wanna be with the cool kids, I gotta get my grades together."

That might sound kind of pie-in-the-sky or idealistic, but the whole thing is this: If you try, you might be successful. If you don’t do anything, I know what the outcome is gonna be.

I think the misconception is that to impact underserved populations and minorities, the stereotype is that you have to do work just with women and minorities. But no, you have to really have an impact with everyone. There was a study recently done that showed that even today, if you sent an email to a professor saying that you’d like to work under them, professors still tended to only respond to emails of white males, based on the name that they read.

Think about this for a second. Those professors have been doing this for years. But where did their perception come from that "these are the students that I want to work with?" If you as a professor never came across an African-American in physics, or very few, your expectation is that maybe they’re not good at this or maybe this is not what their interest is.

But if I impact a young man, let’s say a young white man who’s in middle school, and his first interaction with a physicist is an African-American male, he’s not going to have this perception that this doesn’t exist. He’s going to go, "Oh, that’s nothing different, I met with one when I was in sixth grade." Now they grow up and they don’t bring with them that bias that a scientist has to look like this. It breaks the chain of perpetuating the stereotype that a scientist has to look like this or look like that. 

The formal term for these sort of things is "stereotype threat." It's a term coined by Dr. Claude Steele. What it talks about is that negative perceptions will be projected on students who will then harbor those expectations. If a professor doesn’t think that a woman is going to make a good scientist, and they behave in a manner that suggests that "You really don’t do this sort of thing," studies show that students will take on that belief and facilitate their own expectations. The idea is that we have to impact everybody, so that the expectation becomes that anyone can be a scientist, that anyone can excel at computer science or mathematics.

Once I learned about it, I found out that I suffered from stereotype threat when I was a kid. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t think physics was a thing that minorities did. The idea is that we have to impact everybody, so that the expectation becomes that anyone can be a scientist, that anyone can excel at computer science or mathematics.

CL: So what sparked your interest in physics?

When I was a kid, I loved astronomy, I loved aviation, I loved military technology, so I would read up on it. But I had this problem. I was really bad at math. I would never articulate it openly, but somewhere in there I developed a stereotype: These are just things black people don't do. It's just not our thing. And I facilitated my own expectation.

When I got to college [at Grambling State in Louisiana], I had to take remedial math courses because I was just so poor at math. I had this one teacher, her name was Miss Gamble. I was from Chicago, so I had this view of what the South might have been like, and she was exactly what I would have thought of a Southern belle. And she said to me — I remember we were doing inequalities, I was never good at those. And she said "Mr. Wallace, all you have to do is remember: 'Alligator takes the biggest bite.'” [mimes amazement at a "greater than" symbol he's made with his hand] And I was like, "Oh my gosh! That’s what was bothering me all this time? I can do this!" I realized that the only thing holding me back was my own self-perception.

I’m now a firm believer that we as educators are not so much educators as perception-changers. I believe I could come at you with a billion-dollar education program, but it won’t do anything if the kid doesn’t think they’re smart enough to learn. If one thing I have to impact in my classroom, I have to impact the students' self-perception that they’re able to do this. If I can get to that, then we can make progress.

CL: Do you feel like that’s something missing from the larger conversation?

It’s interesting you say that. When I look at debates going on with education, we talk about achievement, we talk about standardized testing and assessment. Very little do I think we have the conversation about impacting the student’s sense of self-efficacy. Very little in that curriculum do you talk about impacting the perception of the student about who they are. On an individual basis, there are those that get it. On the national greater conversation, I think that’s something that’s overlooked.

I mean, how do you quantify that? How do you say, "Here’s this curriculum, and this is how we’re going to impact the student’s sense of self-efficacy"? It’s not there, and I’m not necessarily saying that it’s not there because of some malicious thing. I think that when you’re in the trenches, you start to see it. Or at least I started to see it. When I started to incorporate that as part of my practice, I started to see the positive results that it could have. When I look in the eyes of a student, I know that look, I know that feeling. So I know how to speak to it. I think that’s the key — if we don’t speak to it, we can’t address it.

CL: How do you start to identify what it is a student doesn't understand?

Here’s the biggest mistake I’ve seen over the years. If a student’s not getting it, the first reaction is to say, "You’re not studying hard enough," or, "Go back and study more," instead of asking the question "What is it that they don’t understand?"

There’s an area [of education studies] called "misconception science." If a student has a misconception about something, then they can never adopt the concept that you’re trying to project to them because it doesn’t align with the way that they see it. You have to speak to that misconception in order to overcome it. With the way the brain works, you’re going to have to show them a method that gets them the result that they’re looking for before they will abandon the way that they previously looked at it.

When I’m in front of the classroom and starting to see that they don’t get it, now I’m asking questions. I’m trying to identify "What is the way that they see it?" because then I can say, "Oh, you think it’s working like this. Let me explain why it’s not that way. Here is how it actually works." Then they can see, "Oh, and that gets me the answer!" And now they’re more open to adopting what you’re trying to show them.

I remember watching a video where this young lady was trying to explain the way the moon had phases. And she had this explanation where light would come, and just before it got to the earth it would turn right and then light up the side of the moon, and that’s why you saw half moon. So [the teacher] said, "It’s not really that, it’s blah blah blah blah blah," and [the student] was like "Oh." So she came up with a new explanation, but she still made this light inexplicably make a right turn.

Then I got it: She’s not getting the phases of the moon because there’s a misconception on how light operates that she can’t get rid of. Then you knew what to address to try to get her to understand the phases of the moon. That is the way that I deal with teaching physics.

CL: I would imagine that everyone would want to teach the same way, being so directly engaged with the students. But it seems like a major challenge with everything that’s thrown at you as teachers.

You highlight the other thing about the way we believe Science You! is unique. We’re not only wanting to celebrate the student, but when we bring in our guests, we want to be with the student and their teacher, or their strong influence, or their mentor. We need to celebrate them, too.

When I first started this job and I saw that when students were struggling in physics, it was really that their math skills were deficient. Their deficiencies were in high school, or even more so, started in middle or elementary school. So really the important teachers are your K-12 teachers. They're the unsung heroes.

The President of the United States had a high school teacher. Neil deGrasse Tyson had a high school teacher. Albert Einstein had a middle school teacher. You wouldn't have these greats if they weren't given the foundation. The whole thing is, let's celebrate not only those students who choose to take on the rigors of study such that they can have good grades and be full participants in the STEM workforce, but let's also celebrate those teachers influencing and making opportunities accessible to those students so that they can grow up and thrive.