https://www.chicagotribune.com/2005/06/02/mr-derbes-explains-it-all-for-you/
Boyle’s Law: The volume of a mass of gas changes in relation to its pressure.
Ohm’s Law: The current is equal to the voltage divided by the resistance; the voltage is equal to the current multiplied by the resistance.
Derbes’ Law: Brains are brains.
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With all due respect to Boyle and Ohm — smart guys, absolutely — when it comes to relevance, David Derbes may have a slight edge at the moment.
The 53-year-old physics teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory School believes that women can hold their own with men in the hard sciences. “Brains are brains” is his succinct summary of this conviction.
Which might seem rather obvious — except, perhaps, to Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers.
Last January, Summers opined that women may lack the “intrinsic aptitude” to do high-level work in science, a sentiment that sparked angry op-ed essays and outraged speechifying on cable TV. Some called Summers’ remarks sexist; others said he was simply thinking aloud about gender and brain capacity — and shouldn’t universities, after all, be places where difficult questions can be posed?
But in Room 309 on the third floor of the private school on the U. of C. campus, where Derbes has taught juniors and seniors from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. each school day for almost two decades, there’s no fuss. No furious debates.
There’s only the sound of chalk scooting across the chalkboard as Derbes, a slightly built man whose sartorial taste runs to jeans and plaid shirts, fills the big rectangle in the front of the room with an artful variety of numbers, symbols, Greek letters, arrows and squiggly lines — the dense hieroglyphics of physics.
Derbes is going over the answers to the previous day’s quiz on thermal physics, a realm suffused with volume and pressure and heat and the mathematical calculations thereof.
“Historically,” Derbes tells the class while he’s writing furiously on the board, “the scores on the thermal test are very high. But this still pleased me.”
He stops, perching the chalk-wielding hand on top of his head and checking his work. Spotting an error, he says, “No! No, I’m a fool, I’m an idiot,” and leans over, quickly erasing the offensively incorrect number with a tightly balled fist, then fixes it and continues.
Let the gender theorists have their hypotheses. Let the sociologists and neuroscientists wrangle. In Derbes’ classes, which are almost evenly divided between girls and boys, the agenda is simple: learning physics.
“The dirty little secret in physics,” Derbes declares after that day’s class is done, “is that there aren’t enough women in it — which is like locking up half the talent pool.”
And to those who claim that a dearth of women physicists is because of the “intrinsic aptitude” differential between women and men, as Summers would have it — Derbes points out that women long have been discriminated against in physics. Thus what keeps them from joining the physics departments of top universities in equal numbers with men is not, he believes, the aptitude that individual women may or may not possess, but the prejudice that all women inevitably face.
“There are a lot of women in math now, lots in biology, lots in chemistry,” Derbes said. “Physics is really the last holdout. We won’t get to parity there for another 50 years.”
A physics professor from his own student days at Princeton, Derbes recalls, once told him, ” `I just don’t think women can do it.'” Adds Derbes, “I was shocked when he said that.”
Yet Derbes, by virtue of the absolute meritocracy he maintains in his classroom, has inspired many young women to pursue careers in science.
Jocelyn Monroe, 27, a a 1995 U. of C. Lab graduate, is now in graduate school in experimental high-energy physics at Columbia University. In a phone interview, she called Derbes “a wonderful, wonderful teacher,” adding, “I didn’t go into his class thinking, `I want to be a physicist,’ but he’s just so entertaining. He made it fun. He’s a big part of the reason why I went off to college and majored in physics.”
But once there, she had a rude jolt: The rest of the physics world, she said, wasn’t like Derbes’ class, where women and men are treated equally, where brains are brains.
“There were moments when gender differences really hit me,” Monroe said. “I heard a lecture by a very famous physicist who actually said, `Back in the good old days, when there weren’t women in the classroom . . . .'”
Summers’ remarks last January, moreover, “just made me furious,” Monroe said. “The lack of women in faculty level positions in the sciences has a huge impact on why women do and do not go into physics. There are many, many meetings where I’m the only woman in the room.”
Aaron Engel-Hall, 18, who will graduate from Lab June 9, also discovered that the world outside Derbes’ classroom may bear little relation to Room 309.
“Mr. Derbes really encourages everyone to learn and it’s 50-50, men and women. But when I went to look at colleges recently, the physics classes were, like, 95-5, men,” said Engel-Hall, who will attend Stanford University and plans to major in biophysics and creative writing.
“I completely adore him,” Engel-Hall added. “He’s a fabulous teacher. A nice guy, super-encouraging, really open to students.”
Derbes’ conviction that women and men can be equally competent in physics derives in large part, he believes, from his own biography. “There’s a tradition of strong women in my family,” he said. “My mother’s tough. My sister’s tough.”
Derbes and his sister, Anne Derbes, an art historian at Hood College in Frederick, Md., were born and raised in New Orleans, where their father, Vincent Derbes, was a renowned faculty member at Tulane University Medical School. Their mother taught in the university’s social work department.
“Teaching,” Derbes said, “is the family profession.”
His sister concurs. “Our parents loved it, which was a pretty powerful model,” Ann Derbes said in a telephone interviewfrom her Washington, D.C., home. “David is a fabulous teacher.”
Yet her brother’s route into the classroom received an unexpected and tragic boost: His favorite high school teacher, a brilliant, mercurial physics teacher named Herbert Behrend, was murdered in 1971, the year after Derbes graduated. The case has never been solved.
“That cemented it. I thought, `This guy was really good at teaching, and it’s such a pity that someone as good as he was could be struck down in his prime’ — 35, 36 years old,” Derbes said. “He disappeared and they found him beaten to death. The last time I saw him was the night of graduation.”
What made his mentor special, Derbes added, was not only scientific knowledge but whimsy. “The day Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, he sent wreaths to Westminster Abbey, to Newton’s tomb, and to Florence, to Galileo’s tomb, with the inscription, `Congratulations. The Eagle has landed.’ He was a really interesting guy.”
At Princeton, Derbes majored in physics, then continued his studies at Cambridge University. He earned his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, writing a dissertation on supergravity, “the steppingstone to string theory,” Derbes said.
He met his wife, Clairan, through a mutual friend. In 1986 they settled in Chicago, where his wife had done graduate work in English at U. of C., and Derbes began teaching at Lab. Their daughter, Catherine, is 17 and sits in the second row of Derbes’ first-period physics class.
Most of his professors probably expected Derbes to teach at the university level, but he has never regretted his decision, he said. “At a university, you don’t really get to know the kids very well. You might know two or three out of a hundred.
“The thing I like about teaching,” he continued, “is that kids often tell me stuff I don’t know. In physics, you do problems you haven’t seen before. A kid says, `I don’t get this.’ And you realize you have to have a new way to explain it. A better way. The kid’s question comes at the right time. I literally get goose bumps when that happens.”
And the great questions come as often from female students as from males, Derbes said — a fact that makes him even angrier when he recalls his undergraduate days.
“I saw a very, very smart woman at Princeton incredibly gifted, who was very badly treated by her thesis adviser,” Derbes said. “She worked like a dog but she got a B or a C in her independent work. Everybody was horrified by that. She was very, very good in physics — way better than me. But this one guy discouraged her.”
Derbes’ speech is staccato-fast, as if he’s in a big hurry to get to his next thought — which is nipping at the heels of the thought just ahead of it. In the classroom, he’s rarely still; he jumps around the chalkboard, fixing a formula here and solving an equation there, then whirling around to draw out an answer from a reluctant student.
That enthusiasm helps make him a great physics teacher, said Kathryn Levin, a U. of C. physics professor whose daughter and son both took Derbes’ class.
“He’s a bit flaky, relaxed, casual,” Levin said in a phone interview. “He identifies talented people and gets them to move forward — in a very low-key way. I wish he could teach other teachers.”
Levin added that neither her daughter Tamara, 29, a physician, nor her son Michael, 25, a physics graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were particularly interested in physics before they ran into Derbes. “I didn’t quite see how my kids were gravitating to physics — but it was all because of Derbes.”
And given her own experiences as a female physicist, Levin said she was surprised at Derbes’ equal treatment of females and males in the classroom. “I wouldn’t have expected someone to give my daughter that kind of encouragement.”
Even students who don’t continue in the sciences appreciate Derbes, said Isabel Gabel, 19, a junior majoring in history at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “Physics is really hard and he doesn’t want people to panic,” she said in a phone interview. “He’s really encouraging to students. He makes physics approachable.”
That’s in keeping with Derbes’ philosophy, which seems to divide the world in half: not between women and men, but between those who know physics and those who don’t — but should.
“The vast majority of my students, even those who do extremely well, won’t go into physics,” Derbes declared. “Out of 70 kids a year for almost 20 years, I’ve had less than 20 who went into physics as a career. But I think people ought to know physics. Everybody in high school ought to have a good physics course.
“The simplest reason is to live longer and better,” he goes on. “I want students to learn that if they don’t fasten their seat belts and they have a collision, they’re going to be traveling through the windshield at pretty must the same speed they were traveling before the car stopped — and it will kill them.
“I want them to understand that electricity is dangerous. I want them to have a working understanding of physics because the world is much more interesting if you have that,” said Derbes, eyes flashing behind his round spectacles. “There are extremely beautiful ideas in physics and kids should see them — because beauty is rare.”
He pauses, then gets to right to the heart of it, to the reasons why education is too crucial to be left to misogynists and other narrow thinkers. “You can figure stuff out. That’s one of the real beauties of physics — huge chunks of the world are understandable. Kids ought to know that. And they don’t. So much of the world is random — why did these crazy people crash planes into the World Trade Center? Why did my boyfriend leave me? How come I didn’t get into Harvard? All random.
“But physics isn’t that way. Things happen for a reason and you can usually understand the reason. Physics is a way of empowering kids. The world is simply a better place when you get it.”
The physics laws enumerated in the opening lines are detailed in “Infinity In Your Pocket” (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005) by Mike Flynn.
For an interesting debate on the issue of male and female scientific aptitude, check out http://www.edge.org/3rd-culture/debate05 /debate05-index.html
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When Harvard University President Lawrence Summers questioned women’s innate abilities in science, he was responding to an inarguable truth: Far fewer women than men wind up teaching and doing scientific research at the nation’s elite institutions.
– At Harvard, there are 13 women with tenure in the natural sciences — and 149 men.
– In 2003, according to the American Institute of Physics, men earned 82 percent of doctoral degrees in physics. Ninety percent of physics faculty positions at American universities are held by men — the most lopsided numbers in any science field.
– Of the 2,062 members in The National Academy of Sciences, a renowned, invitation-only professional organization for America’s top scientists, 9 percent are female.
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