Week 6 ~ Getting pensive …

I have spent this summer with Angie and John at Wickiup Hills Learning Center.  I really enjoyed helping them with their youth programs. And we were able to leave behind a couple of program guides that we created. It was great working with Chuck, Jenny, Sarah, and Gail.

One of the things that makes this program great is the collaboration with the businesses and our supervisors.  It is good for us to walk in their shoes; to see how the other half lives. We live and breathe our teacher schedules for more than 9 months out of the year. It is good to see and experience another schedule and work load. Having these experiences help us relate the world to our students. I teach 7^th through 12 graders. And my juniors and seniors are getting ready to go out there. Some will go to college, but some will begin to work and not do college. Every one of us only are really only familiar with what our family and close friends do. Some students will do exactly what their parents do. But it does take a village to raise a child. If us teachers can be just one more person to give them new perspectives and ideas and bits of information to make plans and dreams, then we are on the right track. With last summer’s experience with the supervisor in the metal manufacturing department and listening to the speaker at the STEM summit tell us the workforce needs good, dedicated welders who can read and decipher numbers and instructions, I was able to pass on that information to my pre-algebra class. Being able to say, “Austin, you might not think you are good at math, but you have a really good math sense with calculations. You’d be great at welding. I’ve heard from more than one business person that good welders are in demand” could be just the thing to get him thinking about welding, or just give him the idea to go in some similar field. And it’s not just me making it up, or hearing it on TV. I’ve heard it personally from more than one source, and that gives the credibility that students want. Many of my students grew up on farms. They love to hunt and fish and be outside. Working at Wickiup this summer has given me personal, first-hand knowledge that I can take back to the kids, even my own son who is studying geology.

The other aspect that is huge for me in this program is the direct collaboration with other teachers. We have so little time in the school year to learn new things. Last summer I worked by myself, but was able to learn new technology skills, particularly Excel features, from a manager and the college interns. This year I am worked with Angie and John. My school is small and only two (and a half) of us teach math. There is almost zero time in the school for us to get together and learn talk about and learn new things to use in our classes. So working with the two teachers and being able to bounce ideas off each other has been great. John has taught me some new and exciting technology tools. Angie taught me some features of PowerPoint that I hadn’t done before.

I took a graduate class that I learned about from Ted. Spending that week with other teachers and learning from Ted and Brian was also valuable.

From working at Wickiup, to working with Angie and John, to the class with Ted and Brian and the teachers from Davenport, I’ve picked up some incredible PBL ideas. I am adding on to my statistics unit with some great outdoor sampling field work. And I am going to excite my AP Calc students with wind and solar energy and the building and design of wind turbines. In these PBL’s my students will be engaged in 21^st Century Skills. We will be using google docs, photosynth 360 degree panoramic picture taking, google maps, excel, collaborating with other students in their class as well as in John’s class in Cedar Rapids. The students will document, create graphs, create presentations and then present their findings to the school via school TV’s or through the school website. It will be tough going at first, a bunch of grumbling, but we have to help our students get comfortable and good at this stuff. We have to prepare them more for life after high school.