When Nancy Frizzell exited her classroom and placed a metal
paint can in the middle of a patch of grass, students began to
gather. They suspected she was blowing something up again.
Gilroy – When Nancy Frizzell exited her classroom and placed a metal paint can in the middle of a patch of grass, students began to gather. They suspected she was blowing something up again.
“I call her my mad scientist,” said John Perales, principal of South Valley Middle School. “She’s good for two or three fire alarms each year.”
Students were not disappointed. Frizzell dropped a chunk of sodium into the can and ran away with hands pressed to her ears. Steam fizzled up for a few moments, growing thicker. Suddenly, water spurt out of the can and a burst of flames shot about a foot into the air. When the smoke cleared a few moments later, the students were silent, eyes fixed upon the can.
“Every day is something new,” 14-year-old student Maricela Olmos said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s kind of a thrill.”
Frizzell’s ability to captivate students through hands-on physics and chemistry experiments earned the eighth-grade science instructor the Santa Clara County Office of Education Teacher of the Year award in the district. Selected by peers and administrators for the honor, the 59-year-old will receive the award at a September ceremony.
Frizzell’s classroom is a play space for all things scientific. ‘Mr. Moseley,’ a 3-foot ball python named after a British chemist, slithers in a terrarium at the front of the class. Two wooden speakers – built from scratch – flank her desk, blasting “The Imperial March from Star Wars.” And roller coasters made of pastel construction paper – built to give marbles a wild ride – pack the lab benches.
“It’s what I want a science room to look like,” said Jenny Belcher, a South Valley math teacher and the 2004 Teacher of the Year. “You want it to be full of strange things to look at.”
The end goal of all the gadgets and projects is to stir student interest, Frizzell said.
“I want to get kids charged up on science,” she said. “If I can instill the love of learning, then I feel like I’ve done my job.”
To do this, the petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair and an abundance of energy puts on a show for each class. If the lesson is about chemical reactions, she uses the chemicals to blow up a pumpkin. If the class concerns the effect of temperature on pressure, she uses liquid nitrogen to shrink a balloon. And while she’s at it, she freezes marshmallows for students to eat.
The effort pays off, inspiring increased achievement in all subjects, said Jo Ann Sullivan, South Valley resource specialist and teacher of 34 years.
When Frizzell quit as a San Jose science teacher in 1979 after six years, she thought it was for good.
Her son was almost a year old, her daughter a toddler when Frizzell’s legs were being paralyzed by congenital hip dysplasia, a condition since birth that caused the hip joint to wear through the cartilage and grind against the socket.
“I could actually hear my bones rubbing together,” she said.
As this conditioned worsened – eliminating sports such as skiing from her life – Frizzell was beset by a series of deaths, including her mother, her close friend and her daughter from leukemia. But the adversities did not derail her own love of life.
“I never sat on the sofa and watched TV,” she said. “There was always something to do.”
In addition to raising her son, caring for her ailing friend and mother, and gardening, she took on special projects. The most intensive of these was rehabilitating orphaned hummingbirds, which she did for about 12 years. She cared for up to 15 baby hummingbirds at a time, feeding them every half an hour with a syringe smaller and thinner than a pinky finger.
In 1999, Frizzell’s life took a turn. She had both hip joints replaced with prostheses and was walking painlessly again within months. However, with her new ability came new responsibility.
“We had to pay the bills,” she said. “I didn’t want to come back to teaching and I didn’t particularly want to come back here.”
Yet Frizzell, who wants to work another five years in the district before retiring, is pleased with where she is.
“This is my purpose,” she said. “And it took me most of my life to find out what I was meant to do.”
