Hewitt's teaching career began in 1964 at City College of San Francisco, his home base. During the summer of 1969 he wrote Conceptual Physics, and soon after a high-school version of the same. Since 1980 he also taught an evening course for the general public at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He has taken leaves to teach physics at the University of California, both at the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses, and then at the University of Hawaii at both the Hilo and Manoa campuses, where his course was again videotaped — a complete course of 34 lectures, Conceptual Physics Alive!, formerly available via Arbor Scientific and now accessible to you on this site.
His high-school book first published by Addison Wesley was instrumental in increasing the numbers of students taking physics nationwide. His 2009 third edition was acquired by Savvas Publishing, and is still popular today. Hewitt’s other textbooks include 6th Edition of Conceptual Physical Science, co-authored with his geologist daughter Leslie Abrams, and his chemist nephew John Suchocki. Then followed Conceptual Integrated Science, with coauthors Suzanne Lyons, John Suchocki, and Jennifer Yeh—all published by Pearson Education. These are college-level textbooks.
To reach younger readers we rewrote these books tailored to middle and high school students and added to their titles, Explorations. Students loved the books, as did the author team. Yet in the financial downturn at the turn of the century, our publisher no longer promoted the Exploration books. Fortunately, author John came to the rescue and secured rights to them. This was about the time that John left the classroom at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and founded Conceptual Academy. The author team rewrote the Exploration books, taking care to avoid the information overload common to other textbooks, while adhering to state requirements. The resulting programs are published by Conceptual Academy on the PocketLab Notebook platform.
Hewitt mainly resides in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his wife Lillian, who helps in development of the textbooks and the screencasts. They reside part time in San Francisco.