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foreign
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very often I get to go and talk about
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steam this is the first time I've had
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the opportunity to talk about my
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development with steam so it's pretty
00:00:21
exciting to talk from that angle
00:00:24
steam is not a new curriculum it is a
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framework for teaching because I am very
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left and right brained things have to
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make sense to me and when I came into
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education things did not make a lot of
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sense to me and so I wanted to find a
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framework for teaching as I went into
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education that was more representative
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of how people learn naturally but still
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could be combined with the public
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education sector and those two things
00:00:55
don't often go well together
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so education has come a long way and as
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I've looked at the history of education
00:01:03
I've found people from the 1400s like
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comenius or Montessori Jane Adams and
00:01:10
John Dewey from you know the 20s and 30s
00:01:13
and of course we all know they had some
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fabulous ideas and because I taught in
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technology education and Engineering we
00:01:22
did a lot with the design Circle and the
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more I meshed my research in education
00:01:26
with the engineering design Circle the
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more I realized that I was working on
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education from an engineering standpoint
00:01:34
how can I Engineer education to be
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better designed so I went through and I
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evaluated and I planned and I
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reevaluated and I redesigned and I do
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this every day that I wake up I
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reevaluate the steam Matrix and how well
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it's working based on what's happened in
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the world in the last 24 hours so in
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order to understand
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my perspective and how I came here I
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think it's important to understand a
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little bit about my background there's a
00:02:04
certain bond that people have if they
00:02:06
were raised by immigrants especially
00:02:08
immigrants that went through the Great
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Depression they have their own viewpoint
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on the United States on the world and I
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was mostly raised by my grandparents my
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grandfather was an electrical engineer
00:02:19
for Grumman electronics and he worked on
00:02:22
the engineer the electrical system that
00:02:24
went into the first modular landing on
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the moon
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so
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he didn't want his kids to be brought up
00:02:32
in Long Island in New York City they had
00:02:34
an apartment there but he decided he was
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going to buy a 200 acre farm upstate and
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keep my Puerto Rican grandmother and her
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children and their children there and
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they were the first Hispanic family in
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this really rural Upstate New York town
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and that was very hard on her and the
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children
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but she grew up where she gave up the
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Puerto Rican debutante lifestyle she
00:02:57
moved to New York City to tell her
00:02:59
family I don't need this lifestyle I can
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do it without you she was always the
00:03:03
Tomboy and in trouble and very Lively so
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I got his very strict engineering
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mindset and I got her very loose
00:03:11
creative humanistic mindset and at 12
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they brought me to Puerto Rico for an
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extended period of time and my
00:03:21
grandfather and I built that house in
00:03:22
that lower picture we hired one person
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to help us with concrete and he and I
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together designed and built a house
00:03:28
that's pretty empowering for a 12 year
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old to have built a house
00:03:32
and at that point I said wow you know
00:03:34
Grandpa we're doing some really cool
00:03:36
things and he said something to me that
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I will absolutely never forget and it
00:03:40
made me very much who I am today he said
00:03:43
you're really smart
00:03:46
I was like cool Grandpa thinks I'm smart
00:03:49
said you're going to make a great
00:03:50
engineer's wife someday
00:03:55
so there are days that I wish that I
00:03:57
could wake him up and say guess who
00:03:59
teaches engineering
00:04:01
the reason I was raised mostly by my
00:04:03
grandparents is my mother has Asperger's
00:04:05
almost autism and my little brother has
00:04:07
Asperger's as well if you've had
00:04:10
students with Asperger's you know they
00:04:12
can be quite challenging having a parent
00:04:14
with Asperger's almost autism is very
00:04:17
challenging
00:04:19
so I grew up with this mindset that
00:04:21
there are so many different ways to
00:04:23
learn from people no matter what their
00:04:25
skills or deficits and there's so many
00:04:27
ways to teach other people and that's so
00:04:30
ingrained into my core so my younger
00:04:33
brother up there is an excellent
00:04:34
representative of Miss cantor's
00:04:37
statement the top 100 percent of our
00:04:39
students and I am more proud of him for
00:04:42
getting through high school and going on
00:04:43
to Community College than I am of
00:04:45
graduating Virginia Tech with high
00:04:47
honors he works harder in many ways than
00:04:51
most of our students ever have to work
00:04:53
for his achievements
00:04:55
now another thing that I've learned is
00:04:58
my little crazy Puerto Rican Grandma
00:05:01
still lives with us she's 89 years old
00:05:03
she has Alzheimer's and I teach her some
00:05:06
of the same things every day all day
00:05:08
long and we go over some of the same
00:05:10
things but steam works just as well for
00:05:14
her as it does for my children when they
00:05:17
were in the sandbox
00:05:19
and so one of the really cool things
00:05:21
about what I've been able to develop is
00:05:24
that
00:05:25
it's really Universal for age
00:05:28
there is no point where it works or it
00:05:31
doesn't work so that was very exciting
00:05:33
to me
00:05:34
I also had a big influence from the Arts
00:05:37
my mother married an artist at one point
00:05:39
and he did that portrait of me as a
00:05:41
child and so I had this great influx of
00:05:46
intense engineering intense art and this
00:05:49
kind of wild creative Homemaker of my
00:05:52
grandmother
00:05:54
so I decided that I wanted to be a
00:05:56
lawyer or an architect and upon going
00:05:59
into college it wasn't too long before
00:06:02
I got pregnant
00:06:04
and I just said you know I don't want to
00:06:07
spend all of my time in school when I
00:06:09
have young children I'm going to go and
00:06:11
do something easier I'm going to take
00:06:13
clothing and textiles design as a
00:06:15
bachelor's degree but I was never one of
00:06:17
those in the Box people so they said
00:06:19
okay design an outfit with one uh seam
00:06:23
and I designed an outfit all made out of
00:06:25
zippers
00:06:27
then I went and I became the vice
00:06:30
president of a company in Ecuador and I
00:06:34
got to teach 140 people all the time how
00:06:37
to make clothes and that was fascinating
00:06:40
then I decided I was away from my kids
00:06:42
70 80 hours a week
00:06:44
I wasn't being a parent I wanted to be I
00:06:48
gave up going to Ecuador and flying
00:06:51
around the country for shows and I went
00:06:53
back to school to get an education
00:06:54
degree well I had to pay for my children
00:06:56
so I decided I was going to start
00:06:57
designing houses no architecture degree
00:06:59
I was just going to do it and I did it
00:07:01
so I designed a bunch of houses and
00:07:03
redesigned a bunch of historical houses
00:07:04
in town and that was really neat
00:07:07
I went to Virginia Tech and I took
00:07:09
technology education the reason I took
00:07:11
it is because to me technology education
00:07:13
is where all your other subjects come
00:07:15
together
00:07:16
you can do math science English social
00:07:18
studies everything and it all comes
00:07:20
together in that classroom and you get
00:07:21
to make stuff so that was really neat
00:07:24
and it's necessary for everybody to
00:07:25
understand a modern world to be
00:07:27
technically literate
00:07:28
around that time NSF coined the phrase
00:07:31
STEM Science technology engineering
00:07:33
mathematics our department moved from
00:07:35
being technology education department to
00:07:37
the first integrated stem Department in
00:07:39
the world
00:07:40
and it was based on the fact that if you
00:07:42
teach all these things in relation to
00:07:44
each other they make more sense and it's
00:07:46
more ingrained
00:07:48
so I went through all the standards and
00:07:50
I started looking for Commons and I had
00:07:52
somebody a professor say to me something
00:07:55
else that changed my life said you're
00:07:57
one person and you're really biting off
00:07:58
a lot here one person can't change the
00:08:01
world
00:08:03
and I was like what did you just say to
00:08:05
me and I said yeah I said yeah you know
00:08:07
I said Hitler Gandhi haven't heard of
00:08:10
them I'm gonna try to be somewhere in
00:08:11
between let's see what I can do
00:08:14
um so communication is really important
00:08:16
and it's not just
00:08:19
what is written it's how it's
00:08:20
interpreted and that hit me hard and the
00:08:24
social studies I think that we're more
00:08:25
aligned in stem with social studies and
00:08:28
the history of the development of things
00:08:29
than we are necessarily between Math and
00:08:33
Science themselves
00:08:35
so to me that said you have to include
00:08:37
the Arts
00:08:38
okay there is stem Is Not Great without
00:08:41
the Arts we've all seen Engineers that
00:08:42
design ugly things or that aren't
00:08:44
ergonomic or they can't talk about what
00:08:47
they do but we've all seen Ikea
00:08:49
directions that's all math and they they
00:08:53
can transfer things through pictures in
00:08:55
art and the language of mathematics
00:08:58
so it became very important to me to
00:09:00
really look at the artistic element of
00:09:02
stem
00:09:03
I also made sure that steam had all of
00:09:08
the basic backing that it needed it is
00:09:10
representative of all these different
00:09:12
teaching theories and learning theories
00:09:14
that we've heard a lot about
00:09:18
he said to me why are you doing this I
00:09:19
said well it's important to teach people
00:09:20
how to learn you can teach people how to
00:09:22
learn yes you can teach people how to
00:09:24
learn because if people don't know how
00:09:26
to learn they become stagnant and they
00:09:27
become like my poor grandmother who
00:09:29
still can't program a VCR you have to be
00:09:31
able to grow with the times you have to
00:09:33
be able to be an informed user and
00:09:35
evaluate your needs wants and
00:09:37
opportunities
00:09:38
so understanding where your
00:09:39
opportunities are is really valuable and
00:09:42
that was a very important part of steam
00:09:45
so to me it boiled down to functional
00:09:47
literacy I left industry not because I
00:09:49
wanted to make a bunch of less money to
00:09:51
be altruistic and teach and I tell my
00:09:53
students the worst thing that you can do
00:09:55
is ruin my good time in a classroom
00:09:56
because then as an educator we don't
00:09:58
make enough money to not have a good
00:09:59
time doing what we're doing
00:10:01
and so my classroom is very intense
00:10:05
but it's also very fun
00:10:08
and we do things like ultimate Recycling
00:10:11
and the game in the middle is a game for
00:10:13
blind students to learn the different
00:10:15
regions of Virginia
00:10:18
and so all of this started really coming
00:10:21
together and I said okay this is where I
00:10:24
need to really have like a summation
00:10:25
sentence of what steam is
00:10:29
and I kept racking my brain and writing
00:10:32
down different things and reading
00:10:33
through research and
00:10:36
we know that there is no true holistic
00:10:40
education that can be taught everybody
00:10:42
interprets things differently so if you
00:10:44
talk to identical twins and you tell
00:10:46
them identically the same thing they're
00:10:48
going to interpret it slightly
00:10:49
differently you cannot control holistic
00:10:51
education
00:10:53
but you can understand the structure of
00:10:57
what you're teaching people and show and
00:11:00
point out all the different things that
00:11:02
relate to each other and try to make it
00:11:04
as holistic as you can
00:11:06
so this is what I came up with
00:11:08
science is the natural world it's what
00:11:11
we've been given technology is
00:11:13
everything designed up to this point so
00:11:15
if you want to take the world forward
00:11:16
which we all do that's what you're given
00:11:19
to start with
00:11:20
it's all interpreted through the active
00:11:22
engineering which is creating more
00:11:23
technology
00:11:24
and the Arts which is not just the Fine
00:11:27
Arts but the liberal arts the social
00:11:28
Arts The Manual Arts and everything is
00:11:31
understood in a basic language of math
00:11:34
now the mathematicians have proved that
00:11:36
math is the basic language and I'm not
00:11:38
going to take the time but if you're
00:11:40
going to argue with that I'd love to
00:11:42
argue with you about that because it
00:11:43
blew me away when I saw the kunian
00:11:45
revolution of mathematics and realize it
00:11:47
really is the underlying language of
00:11:48
everything and there's a purity to it
00:11:50
that's just beautiful
00:11:52
so what I wanted to do was working out
00:11:56
and I was creating
00:11:58
a place where everybody could learn from
00:12:00
each other and where I could be a
00:12:02
continuous learner they could further
00:12:04
investigate any topic and they could
00:12:07
fully participate whether they were
00:12:08
Advanced learner or whether they were
00:12:11
somebody with difficulties and what I
00:12:13
realized is all my Learners are advanced
00:12:15
in one way or more and have difficulties
00:12:18
in one way or more
00:12:20
and the assessment the last thing that I
00:12:23
was going to do in my classroom was give
00:12:25
kids bubble sheet tests it was just not
00:12:26
going to happen and I got kids to do
00:12:30
more paperwork by not requiring a test
00:12:33
at the end and keeping track in a
00:12:35
portfolio as they had their brainstorm
00:12:37
ideas and their epiphanies than I did at
00:12:40
giving them a test at the end and then I
00:12:42
found out that that really strengthened
00:12:44
their abilities to do well on their
00:12:46
tests in other classes so the other
00:12:48
teachers were happy with what I was
00:12:49
doing as well
00:12:51
so I had a team because my school I went
00:12:55
to work with was very rural very poor
00:12:57
Appalachia they'd never had an
00:12:58
engineering program before and they were
00:13:00
not going to let me have an engineering
00:13:02
program so I started an after school
00:13:03
engineering club and we decided that we
00:13:05
were going to tackle a national
00:13:06
engineering competition and the
00:13:09
assignment was to do an engineered prom
00:13:11
design and we decided to base it on the
00:13:13
periodic table of elements because most
00:13:14
of my students would never take
00:13:15
chemistry or physics and so I wanted to
00:13:18
get some upper level chemistry and
00:13:19
physics into their curriculum so I had
00:13:22
kids who would never talk to each other
00:13:23
cheerleaders and they used the term so
00:13:26
I'm not using it badly rednecks and you
00:13:30
know super religious kids and super kids
00:13:33
in heavy metal and they would never talk
00:13:35
to each other in the hallway and they
00:13:36
all ended up on my team and they bonded
00:13:39
amazing and this is the outfit that we
00:13:41
made we won first place Nationals our
00:13:43
first year out as a team
00:13:45
and
00:13:46
um we had a blast and we actually had
00:13:49
um these people who are really
00:13:51
knowledgeable about the elements send us
00:13:52
real elements to put on the inside of
00:13:54
the jacket and for the radioactive ones
00:13:56
we had those little glow sticks so he
00:13:58
glowed as he walked down the runway and
00:14:00
my kids learn more about geometry and
00:14:03
all those other things science chemistry
00:14:05
than they did in their other classes the
00:14:07
rewards were fabulous there were some
00:14:10
problems one of them stabbed themselves
00:14:11
we ended up in the hospital during
00:14:12
Nationals you know nothing ever goes
00:14:16
smoothly
00:14:18
um and this face of mine is just the
00:14:21
epitome of what have I done and I would
00:14:23
feel that way every day for like 30
00:14:25
seconds I'd wake up and go oh no what am
00:14:28
I going to do today how am I going to
00:14:29
get through today and then I'd be like
00:14:30
that's all right kids got it
00:14:32
um so steam is about where all effort is
00:14:34
encouraged it's representative of the
00:14:36
surrounding culture Korea just adopted
00:14:39
it as the new way to teach Across the
00:14:40
Nation K-12 I was there this Summer that
00:14:43
was an incredible experience
00:14:46
um it's benchmarked it can be done
00:14:48
inexpensively administrators love to
00:14:50
hear that there's a transportation
00:14:53
curriculum that I give there's a course
00:14:55
that I base where I turn it upside down
00:14:56
and I say this is where you are where do
00:14:59
you want to get to these are the roads
00:15:00
you can take
00:15:01
and that's what I have to share with you
00:15:03
this morning thank you
