Homewood Resident Takes an Inventive Approach to Education

Homewood resident Barry Latham, a chemistry and physics teacher at Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, is no ordinary instructor.

Latham is responsible for securing a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the Lemelson-MIT program to fund his students’ solar-powered oil refining invention.

His efforts have helped make Bloom one of only 14 schools in the nation—and the only school in Illinois—to receive the grant.

“High school, by its nature, is ‘Here’s a fact. Spit it back in a couple weeks and move on to the next fact,’” Latham said. “It’s nice that there’s ways around it.”

His “way around it” is helping his students to invent a solar-powered oil-refining machine. The creation yields a primary ingredient for biodiesel fuel.

“It opens up a bunch of new doors — on your outlook, on what you want to do and on where you are going,” said team captain Guadalupe Avalos, a sophomore at Bloom.

According to Latham, the project offers students the ability to get creative with their education.

“My students are honors and AP students for the most part,” Latham said. “They don’t take the shop classes, they take the … more academically rigorous courses. It’s great that I can find a way to marry those two things and say, ‘Here is hard science, but you’ve got to use a drill to do it.’”

Aside from the students, Latham has personal reasons for his above-and-beyond teaching style.

“If I had to teach the same thing over and over, year after year after year, I’d get bored,” he said. “I like doing these projects. I like keeping up on my woodworking skills and plumbing skills and electrical skills."

The invention process has had a dramatic impact on the students involved. Avalos says she feels lucky to be involved in such a program.

“It made me want to be an engineer," she said. "(I wanted to be) a business major.”

Latham says his project gives his students something that many high school graduates miss out on.

“It offers them skills,” he said. “There are so few high school students that leave high school with a skill of any kind. My students leave knowing how to do PVC pipe welding and how to use a circular saw and a power drill and what a flat blade versus a Phillips tip is, and plumbing skills and electrical skills.”

As a result of their efforts, Latham and a select number of his students will make a visit to MIT to present their invention in front of the likes of MIT professors and Nobel Laureates.

“These are incredible inventions, these are incredible students,” Latham said.

He should know. After all...

“He knows a lot,” Avalos said.