SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Bradley Pierce’s life journey has led him to where he wants to be, the East Side Union High School District (ESUHSD).

Pierce is Silver Creek High School’s new Chemistry teacher, born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Oceanside, California.

Pierce is located in the H-building, commonly known as the Science building. He took over the former chemistry teacher Narquiz Cervantes’ classroom in H-4. 

In his youth, it was impossible to think that Pierce may end up a Chemistry teacher. Growing up, he had a very strong dislike for his teachers. 

“So now, when I get a lot of attitude, a lot of negativity from the students, I just rewind my mind to how I treated my teachers, and it’s like I created that karma, and it feels like in some ways I deserve it, because I was so bad to my teachers,” Pierce said.

Chemistry hasn’t always been his goal though. After high school, Pierce didn’t choose to pursue a higher level of education and settled with a full-time job packing boxes in a golf factory for five years.

Following this job, he decided to attend a community college for general education with the motive to attain more education and qualifications, without an end goal in mind.

In community college, his Chemistry teacher told a story that inspired him to pick up chemistry. “He was talking about his dog, got an eye infection, and he was talking about ‘Oh, my dog got an eye infection, and I whipped up a 0.25M solution of silver nitrate, and I just dropped it into his eyes, and he got better in a day,’” Pierce says. “I was fascinated, I wanted to do that.”

Pierce was also told by the same teacher that he was good at Chemistry and got a high grade in that class. “Chemistry is known to be difficult, so when people looked at me [and saw the high grade], they’re like ‘Ooh, you must be smart,’ and I didn’t feel very smart, but I did a lot of work, and it pushed me, kept me going.”

He then transferred to University of California (UC) San Diego with a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmacological Chemistry.

From here, he was hired at Pfizer as a drug chemist. “For years and years and years and years while I was in college, I wanted to be a chemist. And then I became a chemist, and I hated it,” Pierce says. He resigned after a year of working at Pfizer, but his love for chemistry hadn’t faded.

He then jumped from selling laboratory equipment to working at Fry’s Electronics to selling cars. At this job, he met a lady while taking her on a test drive, and she inspired him to become a teacher through her stories as a middle school Science teacher.

In 2006 he received his teaching credentials at California State University Channel Islands and worked his first teaching job in 2007 at Bunche Middle School for five years. He didn’t settle for one school; he then taught in London for a year, at Compton High School for five years, at CATCH Prep Charter High School until the pandemic hit, where he worked at James Logan High School, then at San Jose High School, and finally at Workman High School last year.

However, since the pandemic, he’s been trying to get into ESUHSD because the district was known to treat teachers better in comparison to the other districts he’s worked at. “They really take care of their people, you know. They look out for their employees, they pay really well, they have free benefits… that is a good sign; you want someone that cares about you,” Pierce says.

Some of his favorite hobbies are painting, going to the gym and a special, lifelong hobby in music. He currently plays the guitar, bass, piano, synthesizer and drums. His favorite band is the “Grateful Dead,” which is a rock band, and he enjoys all genres of music. In third grade, he learned and played his first instrument, the violin. 

In his childhood, the home was an unpleasant environment growing up. “I just thought [that] my mom was meaner than all the other moms, and I just wasn’t making the connection,” Pierce says. “But what I learned later is that when everything was going bad in the house, I would often just be in my room playing my violin as an escape.”

By this point, Pierce has had so many different jobs and overcome so many obstacles, and now that he’s finally made it to the East Side, he thinks he has only five more years until retiring. “I kinda want to do books on tape,” Pierce says. “I want to read chemistry textbooks into audiobooks, and then the kids can listen to it, and they have someone who’s a good reader.”

“I feel like I’ve already met my goal in life; I could die in five minutes and life would be complete because students I’ve bumped into in the past have told me ways I’ve impacted them I didn’t know.”