Meet Brian O’Connor, our resident of the month! Brian is working on his certification in secondary science, focusing on Physics, completing his residency in Pittsfield.
“Many of my best mentors and inspirations in my life have been my physics teachers. They’ve taught me an appreciation for hard work, dedication, knowledge, and empathy, just to name a few critical lessons. If I can provide even a fraction of that mentorship to a few students that need it, I’ll have done justice to those people.”
Before joining the TRRE program, Brian was a Physics major at UNH, where he worked as a peer tutor in physics. He has lived in many New England locations, including the tiny rural town of Thetford, Vermont. Brian experienced several different public school settings, and found many valuable mentors in the teachers at these schools, especially his physics teachers. He hopes that through the TRRE program he can learn to provide the same level of mentorship for his own students by developing his confidence and competency with pedagogical theory and experience in the classroom.
Brian did his summer community-based internship at Pittsfield Youth Workshop. He found the experience was meaningful in forming connections with the community and with future students. In his residency, Brian has found Pittsfield Middle High School to be unique in its commitment to the same progressive teaching practices that TRRE residents learn about in coursework, which allows him to directly implement concepts TRRE teaches to the classroom in real time.
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