Despite a failing education system in which very few college students wish to study and become a teacher in the United States, I was one who was naive enough to become a secondary school educator. After having taught high school engineering for the past academic year, I have some thoughts about schooling and my position within the school.

At the most basic level, I am a babysitter. Keeping tabs on students for an hour in a school day, making sure they do not break any rules: hurting themselves or others, bullying, abusing drugs. I take care of them: intervening during serious illnesses, giving them a shoulder to cry on, being a positive force in a chaotic world. Some students need more care than others and those students require more attention than others.

At another level, I am an intermediate guide for students, helping them develop more basic skills that involve both social-emotional learning: how to be empathetic, how to be kind, how to interact with people in a respectful tone. Other basic skills we work on include reading, writing, and arithmetic. Unfortunately, this generation of students have a much lower understanding/capacity for those basic skills than previous generations (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38). This realization happened in my student teaching internship during the 2021-2022 academic year. Most of the experienced teachers at my school chalked it up to the COVID pandemic, are they right? I am not sure, correlation is not causation; however, there is a correlation between online learning and cognitive decline (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10266495/).

The feeling that I am failing some students and only slightly helping other students is omnipresent. The students who complete activities in a quarter of the time that others take makes me believe I am not challenging or simulating their brain. Looking at the work of most students, I feel disappointed that their work did not meet my expectations. That could be the result of my years teaching at a university, but I am not sure. Of course, there are examples of students’ work that make me proud of my students, which tell me I am doing my job. However, there is always the feeling that what I am doing is meaningless and has no effect on the trajectory of my students’ lives.

Regardless, my goal for instruction in my current position is to instruct students about engineering. Throughout this year, we have focused mostly on the engineering design cycle described by various people: JPL ,  https://www.teachengineering.org/. Despite the many resources out there, I struggle with embedding engineering within a larger context for students, one that gives them a reason to care about engineering. I also struggle with meeting the needs of all my students, often failing the overachieving students; I tend to favor, in my instruction, slower students. 

For the next school year, I hope to focus more on first principles across all engineering challenges I give my students, thereby creating a more uniform message in my class. I want to better cover the state standards by using those standards to springboard discussions and activities that relate to real-world problems, problems we can gather data on, analyze, and incorporate into our discussions or activities. Within those discussions, I want to create opportunities for my students to work to the level they desire, allowing my overachieving students to challenge themselves.

JLS