Current Chemistry and Theory of Knowledge teacher, Dr. Crane, is an integral member of the BCA community. Now in his 14th year of teaching at BCA, he is well-known for his implementation of technology along with the flipped classroom model, in which instructional videos are watched at home allowing for practice problems to be worked on during his class time. Besides teaching, he has coached sports teams and conducted research, and the Academy Chronicle recently had the opportunity to speak with him about his background and life beyond the classroom.
ACADEMY CHRONICLE: Where did you grow up?
So I grew up in a small suburb south of Boston called Avon, a very small town. When I was growing up in Avon there were probably 5,000 or 6,000 people in it. To give you an idea as to how small it was, in my high school graduating class I was one of – I think it was about 50 students, and it was a public school so it was a very small town. But, it was also nice being a 30 minute drive from being in Boston, so we had the big city right there in our backyard but we also had the advantages of a small town.
So you spent a lot of time in Boston when you were growing up?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Boston has a much different feel than New York. You know, New York is a city – it’s one of the great cities of the world. Boston has always struck me like a big town. It has much more of a town feel to it. Like New York, it has its different neighborhoods, and I think in some parts of Boston depending upon where you’re from, you’re even referred to as being a “Towny.” So, it definitely has a different feel than New York City. It doesn’t have, you know, maybe the typical energy and hustle-and-bustle of a New York City; it’s got more of, sort of a, New England town feel to it.
Yeah it definitely has a much more homey vibe when you’re walking around on the streets.
Pretty much. But at the same time, if you’re not from Boston and you try to get from Point A to Point B in Boston, good luck to you.
You stick out?
Yeah, exactly. You’ll be driving the wrong way down a one-way street and by the way, it’s not even marked that it’s a one-way street – it’s just everyone knows that it’s a one-way street. Whereas in New York, if you’re at 6th and 32nd and you need to get to 7th and 93rd, you just follow the numbers and you get there, so it’s a lot easier to navigate.
Where did you pursue your undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral studies?
So, my undergraduate was at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. I guess being in the Boston area growing up I wasn’t satisfied that I wasn’t seeing enough snow and that it wasn’t cold enough, so I said “Okay, well I’m going to go where it’s really cold,” so I went to Rochester. The reasons I went there were – I would say that I was looking for a small to medium sized school, and [the University of] Rochester fits that idea. It has, you know, maybe 4,500-5,000 undergraduates, something like that, and it’s probably bigger now. But it was also a university, and I wanted to go to a university. I didn’t want to do necessarily a tech school because although I did end up sticking with my major of chemistry, I wasn’t 100% sure, so I wanted to have the flexibility that a university would have. And although I’m not myself musically talented, the Eastman School of Music is associated with [the University of] Rochester, so I just kind of liked that whole vibe that the school had. So that’s sort of why I went there. Plus they were pretty generous with the financial aid, and being pretty much a middle class family, getting the money certainly was helpful.
And then for graduate school I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I went there because I was looking for a place that was going to do great science and at that point I knew that I wanted to pursue chemistry and [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill has a great reputation for chemistry. And also, when you’re looking for a graduate school, one of the keys is to find a school where there are multiple professors who you can imagine yourself working with, so [the University of North] Carolina compared to some of the different schools that I was looking at probably had the best ratio there, so there were like three to four different professors whose work interested me. So, if I went there, and it didn’t work out with choice #1, you know, choice #2 and choice #3 would have been there to pursue as well. And, at that point, I had the chance – I could have gone back to the Boston area and gone to one of the marquis schools in the Boston area. I had that chance but I didn’t want to go back home. I wanted to experience a different part of the country, so heading south seemed like a pretty good idea.
I loved North Carolina. Mrs. Dr. Crane and I often talk about how when we get old we’ll probably head back south and go to something like North Carolina for our retirement just because it’s so beautiful down there. The people – they can’t be nicer. It has a different pace, and it’s very relaxing down there. And, the guy I ended up doing my Ph.D. with I think described [the school] pretty well to me early on when I was there. He kind of said, “Todd, you know some schools probably do better science than we do, but they don’t have as much fun as we do and there are other schools that probably have more fun than we do, but don’t do as good science.” So he described it of being a nice balance. And obviously, I met Mrs. Dr. Crane down there so it had that going for it, too.
And then post doctorate, so now we’re talking about the late 90s so it’s – what was it – 1999 when we finished our Ph.Ds., and between looking at what we wanted to do after being done with graduate school we had some post doc offers at Yale and we had some post doc offers at the Scripps Research Institute, which is in La Jolla, California. So we kind of laid out the options and we could go to Yale and to New England or we can go to southern California, and you know, post docs are a year or two experience and when we laid it all out we were like, “Well we’re never going to live in California permanently. But we’re young. We’re broke. So let’s just be young and broke in southern California.” You know, scientifically, the science at Scripps was really interesting and the science at Yale was really interesting so that was kind of I would say even. So, we kind of chose the lifestyle at that point and thinking that we’re not going to live in California when we are actually grown up and starting to have a family, so we were like, “Let’s go to southern California because when else would we have the chance?”
And that’s the thing. Being a total middle class kid from New England whose parents did not go to college – both of my parents were both working class Americans. So, we didn’t have all the money in the world but we were doing fine. But the thing that I really got out of my own education and that I constantly tell students is use it as a chance to see part of the world. Now, I only saw different parts of the States, but there was no chance that I think if I didn’t become an educated person I would have lived in North Carolina for 5+ years; there’s almost no chance that I would have moved to California unless educational opportunities took me there. And now, here in New Jersey, again it’s sort of an extension of the educational opportunities. Trying to become an educated person, the ancillary benefit we got out of it was really a chance to see different parts of the country. I can say that I’ve lived for 4+ years in upstate New York. Obviously I grew up in Massachusetts. I spent 5+ years in North Carolina and spent a better part of a year in southern California. Now I’m here in New Jersey, so I guess I kind of missed the middle part of the country, but I got to see a little bit of the States through education, which is I think something students really need to keep in mind when they think about their own education.
Yeah I’m sure you get to learn a lot just through your travels, too. I think there is a different dimension to your education when you travel.
Oh absolutely. The pace of life in upstate New York is one thing. The pace of life in North Carolina it was something else. In southern California it was something else. When we were in southern California, I mean it’s kind of a cliché, but it was so true when we were there – nobody is out of shape in southern California because the weather is beautiful basically for 11½ months out of the year, so you kind of have to be in shape.
This sounds hokey, but it’s totally a different vibe out there. We took up roller blading; Mrs. Dr. Crane was going to aerobics all the time and I went running like a madman. It certainly was a healthy lifestyle.
The traffic is exactly how it’s portrayed because the only way you get anywhere in southern California is you get on the freeway. You can’t take side roads to get anywhere because there are big valleys in the way. The road literally ends, so you have to take the freeway everywhere so that wasn’t the best part about it. But, I dug living in southern California for a while.
So how did you end up coming to New Jersey? Was it BCA or you just wanted to come here in general?
Well we always knew we were going to head back east, and at the time that my post doc was starting to wind down and I was starting to look for jobs, at that point while I was at Scripps – or, before I went to Scripps I was still kind of up in the air: “Did I want to go into industry?” or “Did I want to go into academics?” And I was kind of leaning towards academics, but while I was at Scripps I became convinced that I wanted to go into academics. I can distinctly remember being in one of the science seminars where one of the other post docs at Scripps was presenting her research. And her science was phenomenal. I mean it was off-the-charts, fantastic science, but she was doing such a crummy job of explaining it, and I found myself more annoyed at her poor explanations than I found myself captivated by the interest of the science. And that kind of made me think, “Okay, Todd, that kind of tells you what you care about. You care about good science, but you also care that it gets explained well.” So that kind of convinced me to go into academics.
I was starting to get interviews set up at some different small colleges across the country, and one lunch I sat down and there was a magazine that chemists get called Chemical & Engineering News and in the back of it they have job listings. I think this was the only time that this school ever advertised in that magazine, and they put out the advertisement for like one week. I just happened to see the small little blurb from BCA in the back of this magazine, and it was actually put in there by Dr. Ostfeld, who used to be the godfather of our Chemistry Department but unfortunately he passed away a few years ago. So I saw that blurb, and I pursued it. I called in and this was mid-August, and the school year back then when I first started actually started in August. We were probably less than two weeks away from the school year starting, so I called out and they said, “Well send us your stuff,” so I sent them my stuff and I did a phone interview. Then they said, “Would you be willing to come over and do a demo lesson?” And I said, “Sure, I need to see some family anyways back East.”
So, I flew back out and actually as I was flying back there was some kind of plane issue, and my connecting flight in Denver got cancelled, so I ended up having to take a red-eye from Denver to New Jersey. So, I ended up doing the interview and the demo lesson on basically no sleep whatsoever. But it went well enough, and they offered me the job kind of right there on the spot, and so I called back to Mrs. Dr. Crane and told her, “Well, they offered me the job and we have to talk about this.”
And, at the time, I wasn’t necessarily looking at high schools, and I would not have been interested in teaching at a traditional high school, but I could tell that this was a different place. When I was trying to figure out what to do, I actually called my Ph.D. advisor back in North Carolina. I said, “I’ve got a few options in front of me. Can you talk me through how I should think about this?” The colleges I was looking at were small, liberal arts colleges, and my mentor put it this way, “From what I’m hearing, Todd, it sounds like you could go to one of these colleges and work with good students but not exceptional students, or you can go to this high school and probably work with very good and exceptional students. Take it from me – teaching is about the student-teacher interaction – so who do you want to interact with?”
When he kind of framed it like that, the idea of teaching high school kids all of a sudden became a real option, a real idea. And then, being a guy who likes sports, the chance to coach and things like that that I’ve done here in the past was another nice little benefit.
So, we always knew we were going to come back East, and then in a series of just happenstances, I happened to see the advertisement, the job listing, in Chemical & Engineering News. You know, if I didn’t open that issue that week, I probably never would have seen it. And then, geographically, Mrs. Dr. Crane’s family is from southern Jersey and my family is up in Massachusetts, so geographically it’s kind of in between, so it kind of fell into place.
Were you and Mrs. Dr. Crane a package deal?
No, actually I started to teach in the 2000-2001 school year, and Mrs. Dr. Crane had to finish up some things with her post doc, so we were actually a bi-coastal couple for a good 6 or 7 months. So I moved out here, and I ended up renting a room in a house in the Rochelle Park area with a very interesting Irish fellow. He was probably the second-most Irish person I’ve ever met in my life, but he put a roof over my head. While I was there, Mrs. Dr. Crane was in California finishing her post doc, and then early springtime I flew back out to California. We packed up a U-Haul and packed up our dog that we had at the time and drove back East with all of our stuff. It just so happened that another chemistry teacher here, his personal life situation had changed and he had to move on and so the principal at the time asked me, “So, Todd, do you know anybody who can teach chemistry?” And so I said, “Well I actually happen to know one heck of a teacher; I’m married to her, so I’ll let you make the decision.” So yeah, she came along the year after. We weren’t necessarily a package deal, but we turned into a package deal.
So you said you coached here before too?
Yeah, I coached here. I think we’re going back to probably my 3rd-4th years or 2nd-3rd years, so early in my time here. I coached girls soccer for a season, and I coached boys basketball for a couple of seasons. I really enjoyed it, but the way the school day is structured here really makes it hard, I think, to be both a teacher and a coach here because it makes for a pretty long day. And then there are folks like Señor Gonzalez, who I know has coached soccer for the longest time. I give a lot of credit to our colleagues who are involved in coaching around here. It’s a lot of work. So I did it for a few years, and then we started to have kids and I felt that I couldn’t do all-of-the-above very well so the coaching thing had to go by the wayside.
And on top of that you started to get involved in the Theory of Knowledge curriculum here?
Yeah, so I guess this was during about my fourth year here that the school was looking very seriously in becoming an IB school so I guess now we’re talking about 2004ish. The school was going through the application process to become an IB school, and the fellow who was the Dean of Academics – he’s now the Assistant Superintendent – Mr. Panicucci talked to me about being interested in teaching the Theory of Knowledge because he obviously knew I was into the science thing, but I also have a bit of a humanities bend so he thought I would have been pretty good for it.
So yeah, when you become an IB school, your faculty go for training and the whole bit. I went to training for the Theory of Knowledge, and it seemed like a pretty interesting set of ideas in the course. So yes, I guess since about the 2005 school year I’ve been teaching ToK.
I really enjoy teaching the course because it gives me the chance to do a couple of things. One, I get to talk about parts of science that we don’t get to talk about in our core science classes, so we can kind of talk about how we know things scientifically. We focus in on what we know scientifically in our chemistry classes and physics classes and biology classes. But, in ToK, I’m actually able to have conversations with students about well, “What does it mean to know something scientifically? What is the philosophy behind that?” And, I also have the chance to attend to some of the humanities as well. I kind of like the liberal arts feel of the ToK class because it’s been able to scratch all the itches that I have as someone who likes science but also as an undergraduate spent plenty of time in philosophy classes and getting to experience all of the different aspects of academics.
And I think it definitely sparks new potential insights into the sciences by looking at it from a different perspective.
Yeah, I think it’s one of the things we sometimes lose sight of because as a nation, we’re so obsessed with our standing in science and math, and I guess that’s important. But one of the things I hope we don’t lose sight of is the humanity that is within science. You know, science is done by people, and it’s done by people with their own foibles and biases and motivations, and I think the fact that Newton and Boyle and Einstein and Curie and Darwin – these people were people. And the fact that they were people motivated how they did their science, and I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind especially when we’re working with students.
We’re trying to teach them science, but it’s important to keep in mind the human aspect of what it is to do science and to be a scientist. You can’t be an informed citizen in 2014 without knowing a decent amount of science or at the very least appreciating what it takes to understand science whether you’re talking about global warming or any of the other sort of debates that are going on nowadays – these are scientific debates, and they’re being had by people and we have to make sure that we understand that there are people and science, and the two are coming together.
Yeah definitely because before the scientific discovery there was curiosity, that human element that caused the discovery.
Yeah, if you go back 300 years, the concept of a scientist didn’t exist. Science grew out of the area that was typically referred to as natural philosophy, and the idea of the gentleman scientist. There weren’t scientists until really the second half of the 19th century when people were beginning to get officially trained as scientists. Sure, Galileo was a scientist, but he was a gentleman citizen who happened to do science. This formal thing we call science really grew out of the Industrial Age, and I guess through ToK I can remind people and remind myself that citizens have a scientific obligation: even if you’re not a scientist you have to recognize the importance that it has in our citizenry and public engagement.
What is your favorite memory at BCA?
I guess I would have to say, now I really value the people that I have had the chance to work with. Obviously, I’ve met some of the smartest people I’ve ever met in college and graduate school and post docking and here as well. Dr. Ostfeld, who kind of was the guy who hired me and was the godfather of our department – you know, now after he passed away I am really fond of the memories that I have of working with Dr. Ostfeld. He was such a bright guy, such a nice guy, so I value the interactions that I’ve had a chance to have with colleagues a lot.
Then, you go through the list of students. Obviously, you remember individual students; you remember individual classes. If I’m still here 15-20 years from now, those memories will just keep on going. I don’t know if I can cite a specific, single instance, but it’s just the interactions with my colleagues and with the students that I’ve gotten the chance to teach. I think all of those things add up to the things I want to remember the most about this place.
Yeah, I think my favorite aspect of BCA is that you get to meet some of the most interesting people.
Yeah, I think the sort of dirty little secret of this place or the success of this place almost has nothing to do with the curriculum; it has nothing to do with the stuff that we got here. It’s actually all about the people. The fact that we put you in context of other good students is the secret to them being successful and you being successful and that we put good people around other good people – it really is the secret sauce to this place.
I definitely agree because as much as you learn in the classroom I guess from a book, I think learning from each other is the most valuable learning experience.
Yup, both from the overt curriculum content and all of the other little things. And you’re going to see this I think when you go to college because you’re going to start having friends in college who as high school students, weren’t around the kinds of students that you’ve been around, and you’re going to see that difference in about a year or sooner in your case. It’s just the culture that we’re able to build because we put good people around other good people – that’s the secret to this place, man. It’s not the curriculum; it’s not the fact that, whatever, we’ve got all of these Ph.Ds. and Master’s teaching – although that’s important I think – it’s really that we put good students around other good students and try to put some good teachers on top of that.
Right, I think it constantly kindles passion and curiosity in all of the students and faculty.
Yup, absolutely.
One thing I remember starting from Freshman year is this rivalry between the Chemistry and Physics Departments. How did that all come about?
I don’t know if rivalry is the right word. I think it’s good-natured gibing, good-natured teasing. I think when you talk about people who are academics and who have studied their subject ad nauseum, they have a passion for their subject, and they kind of think that their subject is where it’s at. So, I think we chemists think that we have the best answers to Mother Nature’s questions, and I think the physicists probably think they have the best answers. And, you know, god forbid, the biologists might even think that they have the best answers.
So, I think it’s just we like our subjects, and I think we also use the good-natured teasing actually maybe as a little bit of a teaching tool. So I’ll make fun of the physics teachers as a way to get students’ attention because, you know, if they hear me making fun of Mr. Liva, their ears will perk up: “Hold on. He’s making fun of Mr. Liva. He’s saying Mr. Liva is a jerk when Mr. Liva is the nicest person in the world.”
I think it’s good-natured teasing, and it’s probably a bit of a teaching technique too.
So it’s nothing personal.
In Mr. Liva’s case it is. No, no, it’s absolutely nothing personal. Like I was saying earlier, I get to work with some really great people, and my fellow colleagues in the Science Department are right up there in that respect. It’s all in good fun; it’s all in good nature. I hope they make fun of me if they think it’s going to help them make a point in their classes. If they want to say, “Well that Crane guy, he’s going to tell you this and he’s wrong,” and if that helps them teach something then by all means use it.
Well I can tell you it definitely has helped.
Good. Perfect, perfect. That’s how we can help each other relate ideas and keep the students interested. If I have to be the butt of some joke to get a point across, I’m more than happy to do it.