Hoover has welcomed a new physics teacher, Eric Robinson.

Robinson, who has a lot of experience and has had long journey to get to where he is today, says that he has “always wanted to be a physics teacher.”

Robinson used to work at a private school in Pasadena but after the covid shutdown, he says he didn’t have a job for a year so he spent his time working with a textile company to write a physics textbook.

He also took that time working from home to earn his credentials (he got them last year).

But even before he got to Hoover, he had to interview “probably like 15 or more schools.”

“At a public school it’s really different so I’m still getting used to it,” he says, “there’s just a lot more people and a lot more paperwork.”

He added, “Hoover seems like a good institution but there’s still a bunch of stuf fthat I’m learning about how to operate in a public school.”

“The thing that got me into physics was when I took it in high school and I really enjoyed the subject but I strongly disliked the class. I really enjoyed doing the lab than reading the textbook. So I decided that when I went to UCLA that I would major physics so that I could teach it at schools in a better way.”

And that’s not all, he has a master’s degree in physics from Cal State LA, doing research on graviational waves with Caltech through the prestigious LIGO program.

Robinson will soon be starting the last part of his education pretty soon, getting a PhD in physics by doing research with an organization that advocates for a certain approach to science education, focusing on labs and questions in those labs as opposed to starting with lectures and building up on those lectures.

He says he would “like to contribute to the research.”