BEEP CALM AND CARRY ON: Mathisen coaches the robotics team.
Photo courtesy of episcopalacademy.org
Decades worth of EA students and teachers know physics teacher Edward Mathisen ’02. He dedicates himself fully to everything he does, whether that’s teaching physics, coaching the Robotics team, or helping out the tech crew during the play and musical seasons. Mathisen is passionate and driven, but most of all, he cares deeply about each and every student he teaches. Those who know him as a student, like retired physics teacher Paul Rosenberg, understand his true passion for physics and engineering, which further bolsters his prowess as an educator.
Mathisen explains that his passion for physics “probably began when I first took physics here with Mr. Rosenberg. I was a junior, and I took Honors Physics for the first time, and certainly I was interested in the world and building things.” After his high school career at EA, Mathisen attended Cornell, where he studied engineering. Mathisen explains, “When I was getting into my senior year, I was asking myself what I wanted to do. When I graduated, I found that research didn’t hold much interest for me, nor particularly did industry, which was a tricky thing because those are the two places you typically go with an engineering degree. In those things, a lot of what you do is you spend a lot of time on the same project for years and years, whereas I tend to like to work on many different things and a larger variety of things.” After reaching out to Rosenberg, Mathisen decided to teach instead, which brought him back to the Episcopal Academy. He began his teaching career as a Lower School science teacher, anticipating that he would later become a physics teacher.
Since then, Mathisen’s time as a physics teacher has drastically impacted EA’s science program. He teaches every advanced level of physics, from Honors II to AP Physics C: Mechanics. AP Physics C student Alice Wu ’26 notes that Mathisen’s passion for teaching is clear. “You can see how passionate he is about physics,” she comments. Max Guo ’28, an Honors Physics II student, further reflects: “I think Mr. Mathisen has brought another level of learning to the current physics curriculum by explaining not how a concept works, but how it applies to our daily lives. The demos he performs in the back of the classroom keep us engaged and help us understand the material at a deeper level than a regular lecture.”
Just as Mathisen has impacted EA, its students have impacted him. Mathisen explains, “Teaching here has shown me how much students can accomplish when you give them the right tools to do some amazing things. It has been inspirational and rewarding to watch students really just show how exceptional they can be.” He further notes how he is free to manipulate the physics curriculum to align with his teaching style, which he appreciates: “Working here, there is a lot of freedom to teach the things that I think are important in a way that I think they should be taught. There are no people sitting in my classroom telling me ‘you need to teach this part of physics this way and this part of physics that way,’ and that gives me the flexibility to teach the kids in the way that they can best learn.”
The flexibility of EA’s system has also given Mathisen the autonomy to make his lessons humorous and engaging. “About 10 years ago, one of the series of tests and quizzes for the Honors Physics kids was about Santa [being] abducted by Vladimir Putin, because he was trying to stop Christmas from happening,” Mathisen recalls. “In that era, there was a big thing where Putin was regularly photographed with his shirt off, so one of my students, after Christmas break, came in with a full-sized poster that they had drawn of a shirtless Vladimir Putin riding a reindeer pulling a wagon with Santa in a cage, so that I could post it at the front of the classroom. Then everyone could understand the true gravity of the physics that we were studying.”
Moreover, Mathisen has had a large impact on the EA robotics program, as he is the mentor of EA’s FIRST Robotics Teams 2234 and 2095. Christy Rheam, a fellow physics teacher and his co-mentor, watched him create the program from the ground up. “He grew something that didn’t exist in the past 20 years and has turned it into a really important and effective aspect of Episcopal,” she notes. Many robotics members would describe the program as special, differentiating itself from other teams; 2234 and 2095 focus on student-led building, coding, and designing. Tucker Ewan ’26, a member of 2234 and an AP Physics C student, emphasizes, “Mr. Mathisen’s impact on robotics is guiding us to do what is possible given our constraints, both material and skill. He has shot down ideas that would have wasted time while allowing us to explore potential ideas on our own.” Rheam has a similar view on Mathisen’s impact, explaining, “I like the way that he’s been pretty insistent that we keep our program the way it is. Our program is very different than a lot of other schools.”
The physics and robotics programs have created memories for both teachers and students alike. Mathisen reminisces about a memory from the early years of robotics. The team was playing cards while everyone else attended a fair in the robotics competition convention center, and it reminded him of how inclusive a community the teams have been. Guo retells a story from his class: “He turned off the lights in the rooms and showed us the Tesla coil, and while we were all shocked he grabbed a random piece of paper from his desk and used the coil to set it on fire and watched it burn in the sink, the fire was licking out of the basin which was extremely terrifying and hilarious.”
Mathisen will be parting with EA to teach at the International School of Navarra in Spain this upcoming school year. Mathisen is excited for the new ways of life that he will be introduced to in a foreign country and the numerous travel opportunities abroad that will be available to him. Sharing his excitement about the new teaching opportunities at his school, he comments: “It’s going to be satisfying to work with these students, whom I get to teach physics to, many of them for the first time, which is one of my favorite things in teaching physics: teaching kids who are seeing things for the first time but finding ways to show them and explain to them in a language that for many of them is not their first language.” Despite how much of his experience will be “foreign” to him, he will surely make a huge impact on those he educates, just like he has at EA.