Carrillo’s amazing chemistry teacher: Joy Schermer
Joy Schermer and her puppy (Photo: courtesy of Joy Schermer)
By Sloane Crocker, sports editor
The words “AP chemistry” are almost sure to strike fear in the hearts of Maria Carrillo High School students. Many have heard of both the famously difficult content and the immense workload that come along with signing up for the class. Yet before shying away, be sure to take into account teacher Joy Schermer, aka The Scherm, whose unique teaching style helps students accomplish far more than they ever believed they could.
Today, Schermer may be the teacher extraordinaire, but there was a time when she wasn’t headed down this path. In fact, she “hated” the subject in high school.Yet, once attending college at U.C. Davis, she fell in love. Where biology was more descriptive, Schermer said that chemistry held a certain “precision” that called to her, as she greatly enjoyed the “math component” that came along with it. Buteven then, she wasn’t set on spreading her passion in the form of teaching. While her husband was attending school, the pair were in need of money, and teaching seemed like the right fit as something she could do and had some interest in. However, she “had a lot of other things [she] was thinking about”; teaching was something to get going quickly before returning to school. But things didn’t happen this way, as Schermer unexpectedly “realized that [she] loved it, which was just an accident.” It was clear that “teaching was definitely [her] place.”
If Schermer loves chemistry, then chemistry loves her right back, as her unique teaching style has allowed for a “pretty darn good” pass rate on the AP test, one that very nearly approaches 100 percent. But what is the cause of such an astonishing statistic? Schermer credits much of her students’ success to her system of “flipping the lectures.” In other words, rather than “spending all of the class period lecturing,” as she would before the pandemic, Schermer records her lectures for students to listen to outside of class, giving more time for “discussion and clarification instead of just building the basics.”
And Schermers’ teaching stays with students far beyond their AP test at the end of the year. She says that her favorite part of teaching is working with “some pretty amazing students” who go on to “change the world,” and feels honored to be “a little tiny baby part of that.” Yet this is an extremely modest assessment of how helpful her teaching is to students moving beyond high school. The most important thing she imparts to her students: study skills. Due to the sheer amount of content and pace at which it is taught, study methods are a crucial part of the class, methods which past students tell her they have used in college classes. One of these students, Emer Parker, who is currently majoring in chemical engineering, said that “study strategies that we used in that class really helped [them].” Specifically, the process of making summary sheets has stuck with them, and in a recent math midterm they created a summary sheet to study. Though summary sheets are now used throughout the science department at Carrillo, Schermer was the one to first introduce them, and feels that they are “a fabulous tool that can be used in all courses.”
Of course, the class’s reputation had to be addressed, which Schermer attributes to the “huge amount of content” that is taught “very fast.” She said that even the brightest student will not succeed if they are short on time, yet people with the “self awareness to know that they really need to understand the content” along with the ability to “advocate for themselves, get help, and work at it” will find success. So though it may be considered one of the hardest classes offered at Carrillo, this only makes Schermer “triple proud” of all her students who excel at the AP exam. She knows that though a student may walk in feeling that it is the hardest class they will take in high school, there is no better feeling than walking out at the end of the year with “incredible success.” So with that, Schermer says simply, “go for it.”