when I decided not to return for another year in my current teaching position, a decision about which I previously wrote
here.
The senior students in our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program were supposed to participate in a poster session where they shared the results of their Capstone final projects. Certain projects were to be given breakout sessions where they had a chance to do presentations beyond mere brief explanations while standing with their posters.
We were not given much lead time as to format of posters, but 16 of the 18 seniors in my two capstone classes submitted posters and abstracts and I passed them on to the school system's STEM office for the event this past Wednesday. I also selected the best presentations from each class - one each from Environmental Media and Research/Data Analysis - for the breakout sessions.
Then all hell began breaking loose, culminating in my arriving on site early (fortunately) to find that 4 of the 7 posters (most of my students worked in groups) had not been posted and one breakout session had been canceled. While eventually all posters were up, and both of my breakout sessions were held, by then I had no doubt about my decision.
So let me give you some background context below the fold. Then I will return to what happened.
Last October I was one of about a dozen teachers from around the country who participated in an important conference organized in part by the National Academy of Engineering on Innovation in Education. One key concept I heard over and over again at this conference - which included university faculty and administrators, entrepreneurs in STEM related fields, etc. - was the wrong direction of much of our education. What I heard especially was that we needed to teach our students how to fail. That is, how to take appropriate levels of risk to
