Dr. Andrew Smith, tucked all the way to the back of the science wing at Stevens High School, has had a phenomenal impact on his students, colleagues, and really
anyone he crosses paths with. This 2024 school year, Dr. Smith was announced as “Teacher of the year” and was awarded $1,000 from the Rapid City Public School Foundation. This is something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Andrew Smith and his clear mottos to impact positively on not only his students, but really anyone he comes across.
Before his twelve years of teaching, Andrew Smith was a design physicist at Laurence Livermore National Laboratory where he ensured safety, security, and
reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapon stockpile. You may be taken aback at Smith’s previous career background and ask, why this drastic career change?
Smith answers this, asserting, “I was looking for the most positively impactful thing I could possibly do with my life. Truely, I sat down, I looked at the job I had… but it was really the question of ‘what is the most impactful thing I can do with the short human life span?’”
Smith has set up projects for his physics classes that focus on bettering situations with circumstances that have unfortunate situations, such as creating devices
that provide clean water to those who don’t have it, dropping seeds when a fire has cleared areas of vegetation, and so much more. He seeks out challenges for his
students so that they can relate back to the world and not just take on a textbook situation that has no deeper meaning.
It’s obvious that Smith values the student-teacher relationship and how he affects those he is teaching—he shared that it’s important to get your students to want to show up, otherwise nothing you have to offer is going to matter in the classroom.
Not only does he care about the way he affects his students, but really everyone in general. He had shared he doesn’t care for status or wealth, but rather how he has
impacted the world and everyone in it. “Why else are you alive? To me, I’m alive because I want to give back more than I take. It’s not just about pleasure or making money or power or anything like that. I think the only things that really matter, at the end of your life, the only thing you’re going to be judge by… society will look at you based on what was your impact on others, not what your net worth was, not how platinum albums you had, not what your ERA was, ‘did you have a positive impact?’”
So, if you were to take a page out of anyone’s book on how to go about life, take one out of Andrew Smith’s.
