Dr. Jimmy Humber, a 1987 Lee Academy graduate and optometrist at Clarksdale Vision Center, has been carrying on a rocket launching tradition at his alma mater for the past 20 years.
Humber has been teaching the senior honors physics class at 8 to 9 a.m. during the school year since 1999. The class shoots high-power model rockets in the air toward the end of the school year between the Commons building and baseball field.
Former headmaster coach Gene Barbour started the tradition during Humber’s senior year. Humber continued the tradition when taking over the physics class.
“This rocket launch takes into account all three of Newton’s laws of motion,” Humber said.
The first law is inertia, which means an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
“Those were the same engines on each rockets, but you notice the first one with much less mass had a much greater acceleration and vice versa,” Humber said speaking of the second law of motion. “The second one had a giant mass, was slower to take off and didn’t go as high.”
The third law says, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
“You have that large motor that we ignite and it ejects a charge,” Humber said. “It pushes off the rocket and the rocket has to go somewhere. Luckily, it went straight up.”
Humber said he usually puts together the bigger rocket models himself and does the majority of the work himself. He noted he has had students put together their own models, but it has been harder to get engines the past several years with Hazmat’s restrictions.
“My plan is maybe some of the younger students that are excited about something like this have a rocket club in the future where they could put together their own from start to finishing, not just supervising,” Humber said.
Seniors who graduated last weekend had all positive things to say about the rocket launch.
“I really enjoyed it,” Peyton Lott, who plans to attend Ole Miss, said. “He’s one of the most fun and interesting teachers I’ve had. I’m majoring in chemical engineering. I know that some of the stuff that I learned in this class I’m going to use. I really enjoyed this year.”
Lott said he learned everything from temperature to projectile motion to free fall.
Jacob Branch will also be attending Ole Miss and plans to be a lawyer, but physics class was still fun for him.
“I’m not majoring in physics,” Branch said. “I won’t have a lot to do with the subject or anything, but I really did enjoy it. I learned a lot. I thank Dr. Humber. He really taught me. He challenged me. It was a challenging class. I needed it. It was the most fun and interesting class of my years at Lee Academy, so I thank him for it. I’m glad I learned so much.”
Austin Haire will be attending Southern Miss and major in graphic art and design.
“I feel like I have (learned a lot), but I’m not quite sure where I’ll use it yet,” he said. “We talked about how everything falls at the speed of gravity, which is 10 meters per second squared.”
Dedrick Gates will be attending Coahoma Community College and major in sports management. He does not expect to use what he learned in physics at CCC.
“The rocket was aerodynamic,” Gates said. “The smaller one went a lot farther than the bigger one did. It was more of a learning experience for me.”
