This year, Hampton Bays High School is welcoming a familiar face as a permanent member of our science department. After arriving in the middle of last school year as a leave replacement, Dr. Zaslavsky is here to stay as a chemistry teacher.
Last year Dr. Zaslavsky was a leave replacement at Hampton Bays High School and he taught both chemistry and Science Research. He has taught chemistry for several years as a professor at Suffolk County Community College and has experience teaching science at a high school level as well. Chemistry in particular is a subject he is very passionate about.
Before Dr. Zaslavsky was a teacher, he was a scientist. He was first interested in biology, but after exploring biochemistry, he realized that what interested him most was chemistry. “I started kind of more interested in bio, and then when I started doing that I realized that all modern bio is actually chemistry. And I walked through biochemistry, but on the chemistry side of things,” he explained.
Dr. Zaslavsky came to the United States from Russia in 1995, just four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At the time, the economy in Russia was uncertain, and the American job outlook was much more promising. He conducted scientific research, mostly in the field of biochemistry, at several universities in Russia and eventually the United States, specifically at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
After years of performing his own research, Dr. Zaslavsky decided that he wanted to become a teacher to share all the knowledge he acquired from his research.
This expertise and dedication is evident in his classroom. According to Hampton Bays junior Parker Molina, who had him last year for Science Research, Dr. Zaslavsky is a highly knowledgeable and passionate educator who shows a lot of consideration for his students.
Dr. Zaslavsky describes his experience as a college professor as quite different from teaching high school: “When you teach in community college, or any college, you work during the lecture. When you teach at school, you have to do so much work before the class.” He added that in high school, you have to teach more classes and that students don’t have the chemistry background that college students do, which makes his approach to teaching different. Though the high school teaching experience is distinct, he likes it because, in his experience, high schoolers are much more receptive to learning new things than college students.
Dr. Zaslavsky enjoys teaching chemistry and he is looking forward to doing his best in his first full school year here at Hampton Bays. When asked what he hopes his students will get out of his class, he answered that the most important skills he wants them to learn are organizational skills and the ability to decipher information-saturated texts, which are highly useful even to those students who will not have a chemistry-related career. Certainly, Dr. Zaslavsky and his students can look forward to a meaningful and exciting year in chemistry.
