This is when it all pays off. All the hard work developing engaging projects and activities, the up-front time spent cultivating strong and trusting relationships with each student, the one-on-one time helping students overcome the learned helplessness they may have for my subject, the letters of support to parents and community members, and the many, many other things I and other teachers do on a daily basis to ensure that our students develop not only a renewed passion for the topics we teach, but a clear vision of how those topics will help them be more successful in what they want in life.

The “this” I am speaking of is my attending a local school board meeting this week to see seven girls from my physics class get a certificate of achievement for winning this year’s “Punkin’ Chunkin’” competition in Cherokee County, NC by designing, building, testing, and optimizing a full-scale trebuchet. That alone is impressive enough, but even more significant for me is the fact that each of these young ladies used this effort to increase their depth of knowledge of two-dimensional projectile motion, one of the more difficult parts of my honors physics class.

This is also when I can, with clear-eyed purpose, respond to those who criticize me for leaving an engineering career to become a STEM teacher in Murphy, NC. You see, in my previous career, I was essentially a “customer” of America’s school systems. In locations across the United States, I had direct or indirect responsibility for finding and hiring people for some of the highest-paid jobs in a given region – operators, mechanics, lab technicians, and even other engineers. Yet again and again, my peers and I had difficulty finding the talent to fill these positions. So when I hear people speak glibly about “21st Century Skills,” I bristle because I have lived them. I know first-hand the bottom line impact of not having a local workforce with the critical skills of collaboration, problem solving, creativity & innovation, accessing & analyzing information, and grit – especially in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

This is also why witnessing a group of students use these skills to synthesize everything they have learned in my classes — and those of my peers at Tri-County Early College (TCEC) — fills my heart with a level of happiness that is hard to describe. But what’s even more impressive is the knowledge that every one of my students (i.e. the entire junior class at TCEC) has the same depth of knowledge of kinematics through the project-based learning (PBL) product they just demonstrated. That project, done in a student-centered, competency-based education format in my classes, enabled me to verify that 100% of them achieved the same level of mastery on a topic that is typically the bane of any physics student. That outcome was something I was never able to achieve when I had a taught in a more traditional format.

This is the real payoff. When I know that through my actions at this small school in rural Appalachia, I have rekindled the joy and wonder for science and math in my students. When I know that whether these students enter into STEM fields or not, they have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to collaborate and compete with anyone on the planet.

Do you long for the same kind of outcomes from ALL of your students? If you do, then I encourage you to invest the time and energy in learning, using, and trusting the best practices NC New Schools/Breakthrough Learning emphasizes in their work. How to do true PBL, how to let go of control and give more choice & voice to your students, how to move from a time-based grading system to a competency-based system focused on student depth of knowledge, and for goodness sake, how to move from mind-numbing test-prep to activities that engage and excite students, every day, every class, every lesson. Believe me, when you do, you will see the payoff. You will also be part of a movement we so desperately need in this state and in this country to ensure that our graduates are fully prepared to excel in college and to succeed in today’s global, knowledge-intense economy.