Strategic Vision
Goal 6
Financial Sustainability Provide for financial sustainability and support the mission of the school and the goals of the Strategic Vision.
Innovation Legacy by Rebecca Luzi
Sam Tatnall made a big impact on Penn Charter students during his relatively brief tenure as a physics teacher, from 1963 to 1972. Perhaps that was because he was much more than a science teacher. Tatnall was an outdoorsman, a musician, a mentor, a lover of operas and sonatas, a rock climber, and an early adopter of organic gardening. In short, he was an educator, an innovator, a Renaissance man. “He approached life with all the seriousness and amusement that it deserves,” wrote his goddaughter, Daisy Freund, in the program for his memorial service. Sam died on June 16, 2015. News of his passing and of his memorial service later that fall motivated OPCs to create an endowed fund in his name. The Samuel M. Tatnall Memorial Science Fund will support the science and innovation curriculum, including the IdeaLab, a makerspace that has opened up opportunities, and harnessed enthusiasm, for STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and math. (See story on page 18.) Eric Podietz OPC ’71 felt Tatnall’s influence as both a teacher and mentor. The physics “was almost secondary,” said Podietz, who spent his free time in the lab, working on projects like a mass spectrometer, an instrument that identifies the chemical constitution of a substance by separating gaseous ions according to their differing mass and charge. Tatnall and his students built this device (shown right). “It employed a lot of the things that we were using in physics,” Podietz said. “It was fascinating to see.” Components of this complicated, large device included a pump that created a vacuum; nitrogen to create extreme cold; great, big magnets; a rack of equipment to monitor pressures – plus, “a panel of blinking lights, which I built. It was meant to look like some sort of intelligent device. I learned a little bit about how to make electronics.” Today’s mass spectrometers, much smaller, are an everyday piece of lab equipment. “He was no-nonsense,” Podietz said of his mentor. “He loved the outdoors. He liked curiosity and experimenting. He wasn’t into institutional stuff.”
Perhaps the best example of that was the programming project he gave Podietz when the administration at Penn Charter instituted narrative comments on report cards. As any teacher, then or now, can tell you, writing these comments that describe a student’s progress requires considerable time. And Tatnall wanted to find efficiencies. So he had Podietz write a computer program that would generate the comments automatically, using the number Tatnall had assigned to a particular work habit. “We made typical sentence patterns about each of the work habits, and you would put in a number for the adjective that you wanted,” Podietz said. “We never did this for real, we were just testing it. It was an interesting programming project.” Computer programming would become Podietz’s career. Tatnall also took students rock climbing, often at Livezey Lane in the Wissahickon Valley, and once in New Hampshire. “He was just a very inspiring person, ” Podietz said. Ted Driscoll OPC ’70 is another Tatnall fan who made a gift to the fund in his teacher’s memory. “Sam was my favorite PC teacher. He was accessible and open, and he just fascinated his students with the wonders of physics.” Driscoll recalled learning momentum and gravity by breaking teacups with a pendulum and weight. “Learning was fun with Sam. And he was also helping us learn computers and programming. He was preparing us beautifully for the coming revolution in our digital world.” Other former students credit Tatnall with influencing their futures. “He did indeed play a critical role in my development as a budding scientist,” physicist Jim Harbison said, recalling how he worked to build a laser under Tatnall’s guidance. “I did later get involved
Sam Tatnall and the mass spectrometer he and students built.
in the research world at Bell Labs making semiconductor lasers and even eventually penned a book about lasers for the Scientific American Library Series called Lasers: Harnessing the Atom’s Light.” “This memorial fund commemorates a truly inspirational teacher who was responsible for encouraging many OPCs to follow their passions in science,” said another student, Randy Barba OPC ’71. Barba said Tatnall encouraged him to apply for a PC grant to fund building an analog computer. He entered the device in the Philadelphia Science Fair and placed second. “Sam and this project were instrumental in enabling me to go on to a graduate degree in physical oceanography. Other than my father, Sam was the person who helped me focus my interests in science and launch my career. How can you get any better than that for a fund committed to inspiring upand-coming students in the sciences?”
If you would like to make a gift to the Samuel M. Tatnall Memorial Science Fund, contact Stephanie Ball at sball@penncharter.com.
Fall 2016 •
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