A BEST Day in Education

 

    (Rafi is bottom left with blue guitar)

     Last year was my first year teaching. After 16 years as a Professional Engineer I got burned out and decided to do something I always wanted to do and that was teach high school. After a one and half year hiatus from work to pick up some needed graduate level courses and student teach I was ready to enter the classroom. I landed a job as an Applied Technology teacher. Not only that, but the classes I was assigned to teach were the 'fun' elective classes of CAD/Engineering, Robotics, and Guitar Building. Yes, you read that right... my school offers students a course (for free) where we start basically from scratch and build a fully functioning electric guitar. 

     Needless to say I was a little concerned about teaching my courses as other than Engineering I had no idea about robots and certainly no knowledge of building guitars. Fortunately for me, the teacher that I was replacing left a fairly good electronic trail on running the guitar building class and I also had a fairly good knowledge of woodworking after growing up with my father building exquisite handmade furniture as his hobby. After a fair amount of stress about not know what I was doing, floundering a lot, and doing a lot of research along with trial and error I was able to limp my way through my first semester of teaching guitar building. Surprisingly, every student left my class with a working electric guitar! Obviously, some were better guitars than others, but the students and myself all seemed to enjoy the class. Needless to say, my second semester teaching the class went much better and that will just continue to improve.
     About half way through my second semester of teaching I was walking down the hallway and greeting students I know as I always do. As I am making my way to class I see a past student Rafi and I greet him. He is approaching me smiling ear to ear and stops me. Rafi tells me that he just did a TED Talk on me, my class, and my teaching style. I stopped dead in my tracks. You see, my high school makes a BIG deal about TED Talks and the school puts on this huge production for them once each year. Not only that, but many students attempt to be a part of the program that day and then only certain entries are selected to present. I exclaimed, "WHAT?!?! Are you serious??? Why didn't you tell me?!?" Then Rafi told me that all ideas are to come from the student presenting and only them. I suppose had he told me about all this I would have chimed in on some ideas which would have influenced his presentation. Both Rafi and I had to get to class, but I was on cloud nine after hearing his news. Then those thoughts turned to fear when I thought to myself, "I wonder what he said? Did he mention I did not know what I was doing?" Later in the day those fears were quickly alleviated as the TED Talks were published and I was able to watch his talk. Basically, Rafi gave a talk to encourage others to teach more like I do in my class which is no tests and the grade is all based on participation and project completion. The link to the TED Talk is here: http://www.tedxlfhs.com/. Rafi's talk is video clip 5/18.
     That was my BEST Day in Education after my first year of teaching and I hope to have more and more days that are equally as good or possibly even better!

-Joe D.