Heywood Sobel

Professor

“SMC encourages faculty creativity. There is an overall commitment to excellence.”

The stars revealed their beauty to Heywood Sobel when he was a child. “In the second or third grade,” he remembers, “I had a star chart. And one day I realized that the tiny thing on the chart called ‘the Big Dipper’ was actually a huge constellation. So I made the connection.” And his connection with the stars has remained constant.

Heywood is now a department manager testing radar systems for Hughes Aerospace. “Radar is electro-magnetic radiation,” he explains, “and so is the light we get from the stars.” He taught full-time at SMC before being lured away by attractive salaries offered in defense industries. But teaching still calls to him. “I love to teach. And I try to bring my enthusiasm to my students. I always tell them, in our first class together, how much I enjoy the stars and that I hope they’ll enjoy them too.”

In the pursuit of making the stars fun, Heywood says, “I don’t hesitate to embarrass myself by acting things out. At 7 a.m. this morning,” he says, “we were leaping up and down, doing the ‘wave’ to demonstrate wave phenomenon.”

Though industry has given him a position that he refers to as “the exalted rank of department manager,” Heywood is still drawn to the “stars” he encounters in his classrooms. “I had one student,” he says, “who—years later—paid me the ultimate compliment. ‘Heywood,’ she said, ‘you really taught me how to think.’ Things like those are the reasons I teach.”

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