Phillip Schutt to teach life sciences starting in August

Phillip Schutt finds the natural world around us to be extremely interesting and exciting, and he wants others to see God’s creation the way he does! Starting in August, he will teach life sciences at JPII including biology and anatomy and physiology. He looks forward to teaching in a faith-based school where he can help students explore the relationship between science and faith and how they are not mutually exclusive.

For the past 11 years, Schutt has been a biology instructor at Pitt Community College, teaching general biology for science majors and non-science majors as well as overseeing as lead instructor a course on developmental level anatomy and physiology. He has also tutored at Huntington Learning Center for the past four years. He knew he wanted to become a teacher when he realized that other students in high school and college often struggled with topics he easily understood. “I wanted to help them understand it too so they could see how interesting the topics were.”

Schutt believes in getting students to see how everything works in the grand scheme of things, and then they can learn all the big scientific names for those things. “Memorization, while helpful, does no good if the student does not understand the big picture. The best part of being a teacher is seeing that ‘a-ha!’ moment in a student’s eyes when they finally grasp how a seemingly tricky concept is really quite simple.”

Schutt received his bachelor of science in biology from The College of William and Mary and his master of environmental biology with a concentration in conservation biology from the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Away from the classroom, he enjoys playing board games, card games, video games (sense a theme?), and walking in the woods looking at creatures.