Washington, which devises acronym for everything it does, has a relatively new one for its educational policy goals, called “S.T.E.M.” learning, meaning the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in our schools and colleges. And the reason is simple: no other type of learning has the potential to create not just millions of jobs but trillions of dollars of wealth from whole new industries most of us have not even dreamed of. Even if you are a humanities type of person—an artist, musician, poet, historian—the influences on your work cannot be divorced from technological innovations that increasingly infuse all society.
Recently, the director of the National Science Foundation, Subra Suresh, discussed the challenges he faces fulfilling the Congressional mandate to serve as the nation’s premier science agency while faced with an increasingly global set of scientific issues. Of the looming challenges of dealing with water shortages, rising sea level, manmade and natural disasters, pandemics and displaced populations, four of the five of these are of intense national interest, but with a knowledge base that is increasingly global. Not so long ago, President John F. Kennedy convened the U.S. Nobel laureates at the White House over dinner to advise him on setting nation’s policy goals, during which he famously remarked that there had not been so much intellectual power assembled in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. But Suresh suggested that to deal with these challenges, the number of dinner partners in the discussion needs to be vastly expanded around the world.
Suresh pointed out that one of the hopeful trends in the globalization of scientific discussion is the use of citizen scientists with portable devices that can feed observations into immensely powerful databases. Which brings us back around to island education. The National Science Foundation has recently funded a new program on the Maine islands called “STORMS,” (Students and Teachers Observing and Recording Meteorological Systems), which, for starters, is a more intuitively suggestive acronym than STEM. The program serves 25 teachers and 100 students in K-8 schools in Casco and Penobscot island schools. The idea behind the program is to use scientific equipment to collect local weather data—wind, temperature, precipitation and humidity—and then use the numbers to create spread sheets and graphs in order for students to ask questions and discover patterns that influence their daily lives. In other words, these students are not just trying to grasp the concept of the “scientific method,” they are actually participating in it on a day-to-day basis.
I can vaguely recall that I was taught an acronym for the scientific method, but I could not possibly remember that it was POHEC: Problem, Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion”¦which has lately been revised to the more memorable OHECC—”oh heck”—Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Check results, Conclusion. If I were king of the science hill, though, I might substitute the phrase “educated guess” or simply “guess” for hypothesis to make the method seem just a bit more obvious and intuitive—but then I might not remember to say the heck with it?
Now you could argue that for most urban and suburban students, recording weather system observations might seem a bit beside the point since their lives do not necessarily organize themselves around weather patterns. But for students in fishing and farming communities, parents are enormously appreciative of their kids understanding what can make or break their day (or year). Students in the one-room school of Frenchboro, eight miles offshore, got proficient enough with their weather measurements that they would turn on their VHF radio at 8:00 a.m. each morning and broadcast the current weather conditions at the school and update the NOAA marine weather forecast for the island’s local lobstermen. Which they might remember as COOL-U (Collecting Of Observations—Like Useful).
But back to Mr. Suresh and his problems at NSF headquarters. The reason that his agency is funding STORMS on Frenchboro and elsewhere is not that he worries about the weather dampening the spirits of lobstermen, but rather that American schools are simply not producing the number of scientists, engineers and technicians that businesses need. There are three million jobs that are posted today for which employers cannot find adequately trained applicants. The most recent statistics for the percentage of science and engineering degrees awarded by colleges and universities around the world showed that in Asia 20 percent of all degrees awarded went to science and engineering students; in Europe 12 percent of the degrees were for science and engineering students. But in the U.S. only 4.4 percent of all degrees went to students from science, technology, engineering and math programs—only a quarter of those were awarded to women.
In an era in which there are a thousand diversions for the limited attention span of most adolescents, educators will need all the creativity they can muster to help students appreciate the power of collecting and recording the details of their daily lives. STORMS, which harnesses the natural curiosity of most children to a practical result even their parents can appreciate is a good place for many rural kids to begin.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.