From Cowles to the classroom
July 09, 2025 — Since 2017, there’s been a Grinnell College pennant hanging on the wall of a science classroom at Northside College Preparatory school, a selective enrollment high school on Chicago’s Northwest side.
Joanna (DeMars) Deming ’10 put it up when she first began teaching there. This year, Robin Bartell ’20 began teaching beneath it, too. Although the pair graduated a decade apart, they’ve come to realize they share a deep connection and commitment to taking a liberal arts approach to science, teaching, and learning.
Deming and Bartell briefly met over fall break in 2019 when Bartell made a visit to Northside, where she’d graduated from and first developed a love for science. Soon after, Deming visited Grinnell to talk with physics and education students about her experiences as a high school science teacher. That’s when Bartell reconnected with Deming during a group lunch at Prairie Canary.
Joanna (DeMars) Deming ’10, left, and Robin Bartell ’20 pose under the Grinnell College pennant Deming put up in the science classroom at Northside College Preparatory in Chicago.
Seven years later, Bartell applied to teach at her alma mater. As part of the hiring process, she conducted a sample lesson which used “science magic tricks” like expanding a marshmallow in a syringe to explicate gas laws and get students engaged in illustrating and modeling what happened.
“We instantly knew she was the right fit,” Deming says.
While Bartell’s first year teaching at her former high school is one full circle journey, sharing an office and working closely with Deming has made it doubly so. Their conversations have elicited memories of Grinnell, both large and small, and revealed deeper commonalities. Both had the opportunity to work with education professor Paul Hutchinson for example. Other things, like realizing they lived in the same Cowles Hall apartment, were utterly small world.
Their activities and experiences on campus reflect a deep interest in making the sciences more open and accessible. When she first arrived at Grinnell, Deming was interested in teaching math but gravitated towards physics. She worked as a teaching assistant beginning her second year for Mark Schneider’s Workshop Physics course, enjoying it so much she decided to do it for the rest of her time on campus. This was despite some increased demands on her time (such as serving as vice president of academic affairs for the Student Government Association).
“I was choosing to spend my time at 8 a.m. being a teaching assistant,” she recalls, “and I began to realize that I should be a teacher.” Schneider, now professor emeritus, was Deming’s advisor, a supportive mentor, and worked frequently with her in his roles chair of the faculty and associate dean of the College.
In one of those important connections, Schneider played a key role in the establishing the Grinnell Science Project, a longstanding project of the College that aims to create spaces for collaboration and encouragement in the beginning with New Student Orientation.
In this photo from Deming’s student days at Grinnell, physics professor Mark Schneider, left, stops to talk with Deming and Peek Ehlinger ’09, Deming’s roomate at the time.
Bartell participated in the Grinnell Science Project all four years and leans on that experience when she’s teaching. Bartell even adapted a lesson from one of her favorite classes at Grinnell, a first-year workshop chemistry class on greenhouse gases and their real-world impacts and taught it herself this school year. Deming liked it so much she decided to use it in one of her classes.
Bartell also devoted time to Ignite and the Education Student Educational Policy Committee (SEPC), as well as serving as an Education Professions (Ed Pros) Career Community student leader.
Ed Pros, which was launched in 2013 with the support of Penny Bender Sebring ’64, H’15 and Charles Ashby Lewis H’15, has given students opportunities to see the broad range of professional opportunities in the education sphere. Sebring and Lewis recently made a $1 million gift to establish an endowment that will provide the Center for Careers, Life, and Service greater flexibility and ensure it can readily embrace new opportunities for supporting students.
“Ed Pros was very helpful in creating the opportunity to build community among people who were passionate about education in its many forms,” Bartell says.
Bartell credits physics professor Keisuke Hasegawa and chemistry professor Heriberto Hernández with making their classrooms and labs “places where students felt like they belonged, where you could be both invested and vulnerable. You need that in a science lab,” she says. “Having that from high school teachers and professors is really important and made it easier for me to learn.”
The end of school year provided the perfect opportunity to reflect on what makes teaching so rewarding. Deming feels really gratified by appreciative notes from students, particularly when girls tell her she made a physics classroom a safe place to be.
For Bartell, there’s something special about a “science magic” moment when a student who never felt like science was for them realizes it can be. “I think that connects to my experience at Grinnell,” Bartell says. “Even if it’s not something you’re pursuing professionally, all learning experiences inform how you end up living in the world.”
Thanks to those life and learning experiences at Grinnell, Deming and Bartell are paying it forward by creating a space where students can attend as their full selves, think critically, and face complex problems. And that space is decorated with a scarlet and black pennant
—by Joe Engleman ’14