Today is the last day of my second Real World Externship through the Iowa Math and Science Education Partnership. I will say that these two experiences over the last two summers have been as valuable to me as any other opportunity I've participated in with an objective of trying to improve the way I teach. My perspective on how the world works for many professionals outside the education realm has expanded immensely and I'm not sure I would have ever gotten this exposure if it wasn't for the externship program. The reality is that not many of our students will be feeding back into the education system, and we do them a disservice when we frame expectation and important skills only from the education arena's perspective. It's not that I had meaningfully omitted including business-specific skills from my classroom, I just didn't realize how important they were. Of course some of these priorities have been explained to me in the past, but the value of seeing it all in action, first-hand, should not be understated.
Science and math, under most circumstances, are not jobs. They are a context for a certain set of skills that help an individual do a job. Most jobs dealing with science and math are wrapped up in a business, as are just about any special set of skills we hope to train students on in any class. I think it is very important that we share this business part of the formula with students more effectively and the externship program has really help me see that this is the case. I encourage any teacher, administrator, business, community member, policy decider, etc. to try to take advantage of opportunities like this and thank you to those of you who have made current opportunities available for teachers.
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