As Carlmont High School kicks off a new semester and students return to class, science teacher Michael O’Neall offers students an exciting and engaging class to look forward to.
O’Neall’s teaching style involves students with new lessons, demonstrations, labs, and topics each day. Teaching two different subjects, Chemistry and Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science, O’Neall has many students familiar with his teaching style. Eli Block, a sophomore in O’Neall’s Chemistry class, finds O’Neall willing to help and adjust to the needs of specific students with questions. According to Block, O’Neall posts helpful videos and notes for students on Canvas.
“He’s very willing to help you. He’s very kind. I think his notes can be very helpful. When you copy them down and try to understand them and you don’t get it, he is right there to help,” Block said.
According to O’Neall, as soon as he graduated from the University of California at Davis, he knew he wanted to be a teacher. He entered a teaching credential program and started teaching biology, but later got his chemistry credentials. This is because, despite hating chemistry in high school, O’Neall learned to fall in love with it in college. He realized that he could make his classes engaging if he taught chemistry, and wanted to help the next generation of chemists in high school flow better into college chemistry.
According to O’Neall, even if one loves and has a natural talent for chemistry, one will struggle at some point because chemistry involves many concepts that build off of others. With this knowledge of the struggles with chemistry, O’Neall teaches in accommodation.
“Once, last semester, a student asked about the textbook for the course, so I decided to make a chapter guide that tied the units from our current curriculum with our older textbook and just share it with everybody,” O’Neall said.
Sophomore Asteris Ling is in one of O’Neall’s chemistry periods and enjoys doing labs in his class because of the involvement of real-world applications in lessons and labs.
“He makes his lessons very applicable to our daily lives. The most recent lab was harvesting yeast, which we eventually baked into bread, which is an excellent example of how he makes his labs relevant to our daily lives,” Ling said.
Ling finds O’Neall’s experiments to be exciting and attention-grabbing for the class.
“His demonstrations are really interesting because he explains the chemistry behind all of the crazy experiments,” Ling said.
According to O’Neall, his goal is to keep improving his teaching by bringing the best of both worlds into his classroom with real-life lessons and creative learning.
O’Neall plans to continue teaching AP Environmental Science and Chemistry in the future. He hopes to help his students persevere through challenges and reach their academic goals.
“My favorite thing about teaching is the ‘light bulb’ moment people have whenever they suddenly figure it out after asking questions, and it clicks. Nothing is better than the feeling of seeing someone go through that,” O’Neall said.
