SCIENCE TEACHERS KEY ELEMENT FOR SUCCESS OF FUTURE STUDENTS

Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ) - August 26, 2016

Author/Byline: Douglas B. Larkin, Guest Columnist Edition: The Star-Ledger

Section: Opinion, Page: 14

I remember very clearly the early-morning commercials for the Peace Corps I saw as a kid in the 1970s that ended with the tagline, "The toughest job you'll ever love." These ads, along with the Army slogan "Be all that you can be," (which I also saw on television around that time) planted the idea of doing something with my life that was both personally rewarding and larger than myself. In the 1990s, I actually did become a Peace Corps volunteer, and left New Jersey to teach science and mathematics in secondary schools in Kenya and Papua New Guinea. The ad was right; it was tough and I loved it.

I think about those Peace Corps commercials quite a bit now in my work as a professor at Montclair State University preparing teachers for New Jersey's middle and high school science classrooms. Many of my students have the same sense of aspiration and purpose evoked in those Peace Corps ads, but their total impact on our society is tempered by the harsh reality that there are simply not enough new science teachers to meet the demands of our nation's schools. On those days when our admissions numbers are looking low - and we have had a number of full scholarships for science teachers go unclaimed a few years in a row now - I wish that there were more spirited public messages about the significance of becoming a science teacher. Here is my attempt to make one.

People love science for many reasons, but for far too long school science has served as a way to sort and exclude, as if only certain people could benefit from what science has to offer. The recent reforms in science education - embodied in the Next Generation Science Standards - are genuinely exciting for people like me who see science as a way to understand the world. Often, school science is portrayed and experienced as the controlled delivery of facts, but this new vision puts real world phenomena, scientific practices and students' thinking at the core of learning scientific concepts.

This ambitious and inclusive vision of science teaching and learning is already changing the nature of school science across the country, and is more gratifying to students and teachers alike. It seems certain that people who become science teachers over the next decade will approach teaching science in very different ways from how they learned it themselves as students in school. For people whose own school science experiences left them discouraged, even as they maintained a love for science itself, becoming a science teacher provides the opportunity to make science more accessible and meaningful for a whole new generation of students.

Many science-minded individuals who have let their interests and talents take them in other directions for a first career often find the second career of teaching intensely satisfying, even when it is difficult. Challenges to being a good science teacher can come from many directions: the bureaucracy of schools, the needs of students and parents and the complexity of the subject matter itself. The small daily victories of making genuine connections with students as people, kindling their interest in the world around them and fostering lasting scientific understandings more than compensate for the effort.

Now more than ever, the impact of science teaching will be felt long into the future because good science teachers make it possible for others to engage productively in the affairs of science, even if students don't all become scientists themselves. You who become science teachers will be equipping students to fight climate change and its effects. You will be preparing citizens to reverse centuries of environmental degradation and design changes in the way we use energy on our planet. Your students will be the ones who use what they learn in your science class to find better ways to keep people healthy, improve our quality of life and create a more just society. And, even if we don't end up traveling to the moon or Mars ourselves, it's possible that our students will.

The choice to teach science is also a step toward becoming a part of something larger than oneself. The work of science teaching has both tangible and immeasurable rewards, simple pleasures, and a type of personal fulfillment simply not found elsewhere. My humble request is that more people consider the possibility of science teaching as a career, and think about the impact that could be made - in schools, in our world and on each other - by deciding to become a science teacher.

Douglas B. Larkin is an Associate Professor of Secondary and Special Education at Montclair State University in Montclair and currently prepares science teachers in the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship program.