When I first drove into the small town of Tracy, California, 21 years ago, I asked myself: “What difference can a teacher make?” Tracy, once a farming community in California’s Central Valley, has been transformed into a blue-collar commuter town serving the San Francisco Bay area. The demographics have changed accordingly. The current enrollment at Tracy High where I teach is about 2,500 students. One in five of them receive free or partially subsidized lunches. Only about a quarter of the students who graduate go on to study at a four-year university.

When I first started teaching, students asked, “Why do we have to learn this?” I quickly realized that I needed to relate core biology to what was happening in the world and relate that information to each student. Being so close to the Bay Area, I had access to a great deal of advanced research. Fortunately, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was starting to help local educators learn about the work being conducted there. In my early years of teaching, I attended a meeting in which scientists explained about tracking human migration by looking at generic sequences, and about the mutagens that were generated by cooking beef to blackness. I immediately realized that this was research I could relate to core concepts such as DNA replication and repair, as well as the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium. 

Over the years, as I continued to develop the curriculum, I forged partnerships with companies like Bio-Rad Laboratories (a life sciences research and clinical diagnostic products maker in nearby Hercules) that have enabled me to make scientific concepts relevant for students. What’s more, these contacts have provided equipment and supplies—items like thermocyclers, gel boxes, and incubators—so that students can develop the skills that enable them to believe in themselves and in their capacity to learn.

On that first day of school in 1987, driving into Tracy, I never would have guessed that one of my students would win a trip to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Sweden and would shake hands with Glenn Seaborg (the only person to have an element named after him while alive). Nor would I have imagined sitting at a Stanford graduation ceremony and hearing a student mention my name in a keynote address. I never could have imagined one of my students being honored by the President as one of the five most outstanding science students in the nation. Let alone a time when three former students would be completing their residencies at the University of California, San Francisco at the same time. 

One of my students went on to Stanford, earned his BS and MS in computer science, then attended the University of Edinburgh, where he received his PhD, after which he did a post-doc at Cambridge. At age 27, he is now on the faculty at MIT. One truly inspiring young man just emailed me that he had been accepted for graduate study at Harvard, Yale, U.C. Berkeley, and U.C. San Diego. He is African-American. His dad drove him to school every day from a very rough part of south Stockton. He appreciated his father’s effort, and took advantage of everything we offered. He was in my biotech class, which began an hour before the start of the usual school. When he was a junior, he attended a summer research program at U.C. Davis. He was accepted to M.I.T., from which he will graduate this spring.