Educating Educators and Are We Teaching or Going To Work?

This week I spent a portion of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at Wasatch High is Heber City, Utah, at the annual USOE - CTE/STS summer conference for drafting teachers. Teacher Gary Roberts of Wasatch High was our host and provided a great conference as our president of the drafting teachers section. It reflects well on his commitment to teaching, being a quality teacher, and being concerned with progress and quality of the teaching of this skills set in our secondary schools. Many are discouraged because the number of classes they are teaching is being cut and they are forced to teach other things or be reduced to part-time or part-time at two different schools. The issue is not that they do not know alot about the subject, but an attitude of not progressing with the newest technologies and being dynamic in building invention, innovation and inquiry into the ideas of engineering and architecture. Are teachers too overwhelmed with the added things of school 'busy-ness'? Is the day-to-day of classroom teaching bogged down in miutia? Are new state requirements in math, science, social studies, etc., cannibalizing CTE skills classes and robbing students who really need the skills to move on in live? NONE OF THE ABOVE IS TOTALLY THE REASON!!! In talking with a few of the teachers after, we decided that it takes great effort on the teachers part to offer a dynamic, creative, important program that draws students and brings them something of values that is important to them in their lives. It is an attitude and ambition to adapt classes to become of math and science value -- principles of engineering in you will -- and to make applying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) the deep understanding of the courses. Learn the latest technologies, apply them to real life, and then extract the drawings that are the drafting part of the skills. I arrived at this startling thought: THE DAY OF THE DRAFTER IS PASSED! THE NEW METHOD IS NOT A ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE MAKING DRAWINGS FOR PRODUCTION, BUT A THINKER WHO KNOW ALOT ABOUT HOW MANY THINGS INTERACT AND INTERRELATE, AND CAN DESIGN TO FIT THE MULTIPLE NEEDS. Example, our cars are not cars, but mechanical devises moved by computers. Merging many areas into a great field of knowledge that he/she can readily apply and adapt.

I presented the Tuesday afternoon workshop on 'Building A Life-Sized Model of An Architecutral Wallsection: Teaching How A Home Is Built and Why It Is Drawn Thus'. I presented this in a scale model form several years ago at a similar conference that included several of the attendees, many built that one and wanted to build the big one. Yet only one did. Even teachers want someone else to develop the concept for them and have all the material delivered in a neat little packet. But I made each do a part of the production portion, work in groups and ask questions to find out what they were doing. Then we had an assembly time. To get it, you had to be involved. Many went away excited, because they had created it and understood better how to teach what they were drawing.

One comment that a teacher made turned my gut: 'The kids will be on YouTube anyway, why not direct them to the sites that relate to the class'. WHAT WAS THIS LADY THINKING?