Narrative
The Need
I think probably most people
are aware of what I call the
"the big bang theory complex", that is, the cultural stigma attached
to an interest in math and science related professions.
I didn't realize how real it
was until the last two years of
trying to recruit for the stem camp.
It is real and it is a common
problem everywhere in America. I've watched
students take an application from me only to have it jerked out of
their hands
by their peers and thrown on the ground.
I've heard teachers ridicule students for showing an interest in
the
STEM camp.
I attended a nano-tech workshop
at Penn State last year.
They have an intense summer
program for 18 hours credit. It is an
amazing program.
Terry Kuzma teaches most of the
courses. He's probably one of the
smartest guys I've met.
Penn State hires some of their
graduates to go out to all the high
schools in Pennsylvania to promote his program.
During our orientation Terry
was describing this promotion
campaign and mentioned that they had over a thousand students paraded
through
the nanotech facility each year trying to interest them in
nano-technology.
Then he volunteered in a somewhat frustrated voice, that they got an
average of
two students out of that effort. All the rest come for the free food
and to get
out of class for the day.
Lots of people are doing lots
of things to try and overcome this
lack of interest problem, yet we are still losing ground.
Between 1996 and 2006 40 of
every 100 students that entered high
school in Alabama never finished.
82% of those drop-outs were
boys. Assuming that approximately half
the kids in high school are boys, that means 33 out of 50 or 66 out of
100 boys
do not finish high school in Alabama.
The National Bureau of Labor
predicted in 1996 that America needed
to produce 750,000 new engineers by 2006. According the American
Society of
Engineers we only produced 440, 000 in that ten years. (China produced
450,000
in 2006 alone).
Between 1996 and 2006 the
number of people majoring in engineering
dropped 15 % in spite of the fact that the number of people attending
college
increased by 15%.
I want you to think about that
for a minute. In
an era when science and technology
literally rule the world, and whose influence on the success of a
nation will
continue to increase at an accelerated rate for the for seeable future,
we have
a negative stigma attached to those subjects and (surprise, surprise) a
diminishing number of young people interested in these subjects. And at a time when unskilled labor job
opportunities are galloping down the road to extinction at a thunderous
rate,
we have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world.
Aside from the bad PR from
sit-coms, why is it so hard to battle
the stigma? What are we doing wrong?
Well, here is my opinion on
that. There are many efforts in this country similar to our STEM
Camp, which target high school students. I think that is like one
planting apple seeds in April and expecting to harvest apples in
August. We need a plan to begin our efforts early in
elementary school and continue through high school.
My experience conducting the
lego competition in our stem camp
together with observing science teams in action for the past 12 years
has given
me some motivation for a plan.