Planning: Day 16

Today’s Song: The Coolest Girl as performed by Bonnie Gruesen

I’m good at school. I’ve mentioned this before.

The fact is, though, that our education system has set up people like me to succeed. I'm a middle class white girl who is great at standardized tests and can read and analyze information like a pro. I’m even good at math. But you know what I’m terrible at? Building things with my hands. Anything that requires physical effort. Drawing anything more complex than a stick figure. 

I’m smart and I don’t have problems saying that. It was kinda my defining characteristic in high school. And the world needs people who are book smart and who are able to analyze information and who are able to make an informed judgement based on the statistics presented. But that’s not the only thing people need.

When I work with kids for longer than an hour, I inevitably end up talking about college. “I work for UNC and that’s where I went to college.” And I get a variety of responses. The problem with UNC is that there are some misguided people who are Duke fans and that makes the occasional conversation awkward. But there are State fans and ECU fans and App fans and they all also defend their respective schools with some kind of purpose, so we end up talking about rivalries and sports rather than the education. It's okay- most of these conversations happen with elementary school kids and I'm just happy that they even know what a college is.

Then, when I talk to middle school and high school students, I get a lot of, “Well, I’ll probably go to community college and then transfer to a four-year school.” The kids who aren’t looking to graduate high school are probably not the ones who are talking to me (which is exactly the problem, but I'm only there for an hour). So I talk to the kids about how important technical jobs are and how they're making a smart choice. Despite what the president has said, a four-year school isn't for everyone. Graduate school isn't for everyone. A college degree doesn’t mean what it used to. There are plenty of options out there.

I’m not out there to crush any dreams. My job is the exact opposite. I’m an informal science educator, which means I get to do all the fun stuff in science, all the things that make you go “wow!” and “whoa!” and “I’m gonna tell my mom about this!” And then I leave and let the classroom teachers do all the hard work of getting the students to delve into the nuts and bolts of science. Because it’s not easy. If it was, we wouldn’t need to work so hard at it.

I could almost go back in the classroom so that I would have the chance to teach that lesson over and over again. This is not easy. We need to spend time with these ideas and these topics. Because everything in your life that is worth doing takes time. Practicing anything long enough to be good at it takes time. And discoveries and inventions and the things that move us as a people forward, they don’t just fall out of the sky. You have to have been looking for them. Well, that might not be true. Inspiration is a funny thing. But to be able to put those ideas into action, that takes knowledge and a lot of man-hours. 

I’d teach that lesson through labs. I’d teach it through problem sets, I’d teach it through independent projects. I’d teach it through build sessions and research assignments and discussions. I’d front the time, just so I could see some students getting the chance to make something of themselves by the effort they put forward. I’d take the time to tell a student who might not have expected to hear it that they’re doing a great job and the time to tell a student who expected to hear something different that they can do better. I’d encourage the strengths of all the kids in the middle, who get left out because they’re going to get through it anyway. And when the class learned this lesson, that they have to put the time in, I'd set them out in the world to do whatever it is that they want to do, knowing that they're going to work at it and that they'd have a solid backing in physics to do it.

In short, I’d do what any teacher worth her or his salt is going to do anyway. But I don’t like the way I talk about teaching, like it’s something I could do to show others how awesome I am. If you’re teaching, you should be there for the students. You should be there for the kids who are sitting in your classroom and who will move on in a year or in a semester, who may never say thank you, who may not even notice the work you put in, who may complain about how much you push them, who may shut down because they think they can’t do it, who don’t want to try, who are just taking up space in school because someone told them that they had to. If you’re going to teach, your focus is on these kids, these human beings. And I just don’t know that mine would be.

As it is, I’m the coolest day of third grade when I show up. I get to throw some knowledge and a few encouraging words. I’m pretty sure I make a difference. A kid came up to me today and hugged me and said, “I had the best time today.” It was 11:30 in the morning. He didn’t even know what else he could do with his day. But I like that I could make that happen. The next to last day of summer, this kid’s in camp, learning about science, and he had the best time today. 

I’m okay with that. 

(I promise a veritable smorgasbord of links to educational articles and backing up the claims I just threw out there in this post... tomorrow. So check back!)