President's Message

Aidan called the other day - you remember him. I have written about him many times. He is my son who hated school, a reluctant reader, qualified for PALs, never passed an AR test, was well below the DRA benchmarks and had scores in the teens in the old LA quarterly tests. By middle school he was fairly miserable. He lamented to me that he never moved in middle school, never got out of his seat. I truly thought I would be supporting him financially his whole life.So back to the phone call last night, Aidan called to tell me he was going to be late. Landstown was having its Academy Open House Night. He has to present his robot. He excitedly told me that he had figured out the code for the automation component of the robotics competition.  Aidan’s educational experience, his outlook, his goals and his motivation changed in high school when he found STEM. Daily, I am getting letters of interest from colleges interested in talking to him because of his skill set in math, science, engineering and technology.  As all of these skills came together and he became successful at school, he became a better student even in his weak areas of reading and writing. He is in all advanced classes, and I hope he will be taking care of me one day.

Why is this important? STEM education (Science Technology Engineering and Math), creates critical thinkers, increases science literacy and enables the next generation of innovators. Innovation leads to new products and processes that sustain our economy. This innovation and science literacy depends on a solid knowledge base in the STEM areas.   (from “Why STEM Education is important” by Francis Eberle)  We know that STEM professional opportunities are growing while many other professions are shrinking.   The ten year employment projections by the U.S Department of Labor show that of the twenty fastest growing occupations projected for 2014, fifteen of them require significant mathematics and science preparation.

We also know that in VA Beach we have an academy dedicated to STEM and a middle school, concentrating on training their staff in STEM.   Did you know we have a C&I person working on a middle school STEM curriculum? What about elementary school? Where are we when it comes to STEM? Shouldn’t we try to catch the students like Aidan who become shining stars when presented with a STEM curriculum, or do they need to wait through their elementary years before they are presented with a curriculum that works for them? How much damage is done while they feel like educational misfits?

My knowledge is limited, but I am working on it.  I will share what I know and have read. I did go over to speak to Daniel Smith to see how he initiated his STEM cores, how he organized his training and what his critical path has been. (Corporate Landing Middle School is attempting to have STEM trained teachers on every core and conduct at least one STEM project a quarter). The key ingredient to STEM is the “Design Process” sometimes called the “Engineering Design Process”. That is the part that makes kids like Aidan salivate for learning- it energizes him, as it would so many of our students.  The Plan, Create, Build, Test, Modify cycle is a teaching tool that crosses disciplines. We have done several of these types projects as I am sure many of you have as well. Our students recently designed and built aqueducts for our Roman STEM projects and we are planning a rather large school wide STEM project that builds from one grade level to another.

Linkhorn is in the infancy of implementing STEM. We are just beginning to consider STEM in collaboration and how to incorporate it in our planning. We, as a division, cannot afford to wait for the “seas to calm” before we start talking about STEM in elementary schools.  Every year we wait, we lose students and opportunities to motivate a larger portion of our population so we can provide our secondary schools with students ready to move further down the road of success in the 21st Century.