End of Week 3

As my third week here comes to a close, I have made good progress on my assigned project here at the company and I had some good conversations with my fellow employees. I had a conversation with my boss yesterday and discussed with her about the idea of incoporating a a workplace like atmosphere into the classroom. I will be working with my fellow scientist here to try and design a high school chemistry level project that is modeled around practices that are at the company. I will also be working to try and bring some of the scientist to the classroom to speak about their jobs and help with the project. This would be a community service opportunity for the company and the students would really benefit as well. One of my goals in my final two weeks here at the company will be to organize this project.

Week 3 Continues

I spent most of the day recording the results from my research project into the required lab book format. As I worked and looked back at some of my work, I started thinking about how I could implement the skills and ideas that I have learned here into the classroom. One ideas was to further build student skills on communicating scientific work. Another idea that I had is to teach students how to properly calibrate technology based lab equipment. As I gather more and more ideas I would like to formulate a work based experience that can be implemented into the classroom. One will be for grade level 9 science and the other will be for upper level chemistry students. I have less than 3 weeks here at Kemin and I will be working hard to use my resources here to begin to bring everything together so that I can carry this over into the classroom.

Half Way Point

I am at the half way point here at the company and my time here as been very beneficial on two levels. One way is that I have further developed my science skills in the area of chemistry by learning the current methods they are using here at the company. I could incorporate these current practices into the my curriculum. For example, HPLC is a method that is used quite frequently here at the company to indentify compounds and I could use a similiar type of chromotography in my classroom.

Another way my time has been very beneficial here is that I have learned a tremendous amount about the corporate aspect of science and how to prepare students for it. For example, there are more aspects to the corporate science field than lab work. Most students think that if you have a career in science then you work in a lab. The employees working in the lab are not the employees dealing with science. There are lawyers who write patents for the company , management provides direction on projects, vice presidents giving presentations on their products, and marketing and sales employees selling the chemical products to other companies. All of these preceding employees are not working in the lab but they have to have a science background in order to do their jobs. They have to have a science background to communicate with lab employees so that they communicate to the people they need to as part of their work.

As you can see, the corporate science world is a very diverse work place and they want diverse well skilled employees. Potential employees are not focusing on becoming diverse well skilled employees because the current education system is not properly preparing students. The current education system does not educate students on all the career options and what is happening in the evolving career fields. Careers are changing due to various reasons (environmental changes, economic challenges, technological advances) and for these reasons employers want and need well skilled diverse employees so the education system needs to help prepare students for this. Teachers need teach students practices that are occurring in the job field or at least make them aware of them so student interest can be sparked. This just isn't happening as much as it should. For example, I have had conversations with current employees here at the company who work in the lab with me. They told me that when they first started here that they were not well prepared for the type of work that they needed to do. Simple lab procedures that they do everyday now took them awhile to get used to because they had never done them before. They said it would have been a huge benefit to have focused more on lab methods during their education because that is what they do in the lab field. They said that colleges should do a better job of preparing students for the work place. Colleges and high schools alike should be keeping up on their research by knowing what practices are taking place in the job fields so that they can be taught in the education system. Isn't that the point of the education system anyway? To prepare their students for the job field.

My fellow lab workers also said that the education system does a poor job of educating students on potential jobs. I told them about the IMSEP program that I am working with this summer and how its goal is educate teachers about the current job field so they can better prepare their students. I continued to tell them that this will be done by teachers learning about all the various career options and learning about employbility skills that businesses are looking for and having the teachers teach these types of ideas and skills in the classroom. They thought this was a great idea and they wish this would have been done while they were in the classroom.

Thus far, I am at the half way point of my experience and it has been tremendously beneficial to me as teacher. I can't wait to get back into the classroom and use the knowledge that I have learned this summer in my curriculum. This experience will help me do my part as an educator in helping prepare students for the real world and I look forward to learning much more in my next three weeks at the company.

Week 3 Begins

Last week was a shortened week due to the Fourth of July Holiday, so I had a long weekend. I came back at the beginning of week 3 regevunated and ready to go. I spent most of my day in the lab testing a number of different samples. I wasn't able to find what I was looking for but that is the nature of lab work. Success usually doesn't happen before you spend a good deal of time searching for what it is that you desire. A good deal of my day was spent testing and coming up with new hyposthesis. Students in the classroom who are coming in the workfield need to have the ability to hypothesize, run experiments, evaluate their results, and think of new ideas if the desired results were not achieved. Students tend to give up when they do not succeed but they won't make it very far in the work place if they do. Well, my day is done here and the ideas for the classroom are continuing to swirl in my head.