When you walk down the stairs to the girls’ locker room and peer into the window of the teachers’ offices, you will see a not-so-new face sitting at a desk. Former Advanced Placement Psychology teacher Cambria Bower-Gersten returned this semester after having gone on a maternity leave April 15 to welcome her healthy baby boy, Ezra. However, she has switched departments and is now a Physical Education teacher. “I enjoy being outside,” Bower-Gersten said. “P.E. is like any other academic class. You have goals and you push yourself to achieve those goals.”

In college, Bower-Gersten majored in history and minored in athletic coaching and music. Afterwards, she taught P.E. at Marshall High School for one year part-time in the morning, and in the afternoons, she taught Modern World at Lowell. She started teaching full time at Lowell, teaching AP Pyschology for the past three and a half years. Bower-Gersten describes herself as a nerdy jock. “I love the intellectual stimulation of AP Psych, and the physicality of P.E.,” Bower-Gersten said.

But being a P.E. teacher isn’t Bower-Gersten’s only job — she works as a part-time teacher, but she’s also a full-time mom. “I miss leaving Ezra for five hours a day,” Bower-Gersten said. “But I love the students and I love the energy of high school.”

Bower-Gersten works from Mods 11-20 with two second-year P.E. classes and one first-year P.E. class. “I love the freshman, They’re so cute!” Bower-Gersten said. “They’re still taking everything in. I like it.”

Due to her versatility, she can apply her AP Psychology skills to any playing field that she chooses. According to Bower-Gersten, when someone’s arousal level is increased, for example by raising one’s heart rate, there is a chance they will misattribute it for attraction. “We used to experiment on the P.E. classes with my AP Psych students,” Bower-Gersten said. “It really works!”

A version of this article first appeared in the Jan. 27, 2012 print edition of The Lowell.