Every small business needs at least once a STEM professional, though is hard to find them in the neighborhood.
To help building stores, measuring errors, installing computers, you name it, though I concur is hard to find them around the corner, unless you are located in Silicon Valley. Thinking in the long term, helping schools to develop more STEM focused students could help business owners to bridge the gap.
Bill Troy, ASQ CEO Encourage the Next generation of STEM professionals asks in his blog what can we do to encourage the next generation of STEM students? The statistician Edwards Deming, the mathematician Adrian Paenza and even Albert Einstein can help small business owners find a better way.
STEM professions (Science, technology, engineering and math) don’t have the best reputation among teens, that’s true. Most of the students think they are boring or too difficult; some kids who like STEM are even bullied or called “nerds”.
When I read about this topic I immediately thought about Adrian Paenza, an Argentinean mathematician and journalist. He wrote a series of books specifically about mathematics that were so students friendly that were best sellers in the country. The book talks about examples of math applied in day to day issues, and tries to convince the reader that mathematics are real fun, and don’t have to be feared.
In his first book, “Math… Are you there” he tells a story about a princess that he uses to introduce his math classes.
The Story
The story is a about a Russian princess that is looking forward to getting married. Lot of lovers try to get there approval to get married. One by one deploys a series of creative seduction methods to try to enchant her. They were using all different kind of resources to seduce her, one of them even offered her a magical rain of lights and glitters, but apparently nothing and no one was good enough for her. She was not moved at all. Her face was always the same way, totally unexpressive.
One day, a gentleman decides to humbly show her, nothing magical or spectacular, but only a pair of glasses. She accepts them and put them on. She starts smiling and offers her hand to him.
What is wrong with STEM?
This last pretender, instead of trying the same way as the previous pretenders, changed the way of thinking. He looked at the problem from a different perspective.
Mr. Paenza states in his books that “Teachers are the Worst enemies of STEM because we cannot make students enjoy the subjects the same way we do”. Or maybe students enjoy as much as we do, but universities are not attractive enough to them. It’s hard to accept that students like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were STEM drop-outs. I remember when I studied, math teachers were the worst from the students perspective: lot of home work where you have no one to ask for help, no team excercises and tests that followed the Pareto law (20% pass – 80% fail).
What can we do?
Business owners can help schools act like the last pretender, and teach students how to look at STEM problems from a different perspective to start enjoying the same way we do. As Einstein said “You can’t do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.” For example, schools like Brockton High in Massachusetts applied the Deming philosophy to improve the performances of their students by implementing various changes in the education system:
· less homework
· more teamwork (use round tables)
· avoid traditional evaluations
· eliminate finger pointing (If observations are used to improve, not to punish, students are better at any subject)
· drive out fear, try to understand what is that students fear about STEM and eliminate it
· promote student engagement by satisfying their intrinsic motivations: teach what is meaningful to them in a way they can understand it. STEM are only useful if people can apply what they learn in things they like doing.
All these items helped Brockton high get the best out of every student. Brockton “went from being one of the lowest performing schools in the state to one of the highest, and was featured in a recent
Harvard University report on exemplary schools that have narrowed the minority achievement gap” said the journalist Andrea Gabor in her
blog.
Like the princess, maybe students don’t know what they like studying, until they actually get to know more about it. The key is making STEM fit their intrinsic needs, but only a deep change at the school level can make it. What do you think?
Luciana Paulise
www.biztorming.com
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