Teacher Stories: Alyssa Bitar, STEM Teacher at Manchester Regional High School, Passaic County, New Jersey
I am a STEM teacher, and I invite the students to let their curiosity kind of roam free. I have the AP level students, I have my MLS who do not speak a lot of English, I have my low level, their IEP says I can’t do math, and I have them all in a class together for a four-year program.
I’m in year three of the program. I have my one group, my third years, who have been with me since they were freshmen, and I adore them. They have been my trial-and-error group, because we have been kind of building this program together, where I try things out on them. We’re in the middle of our robotics unit, and half of my kids are really interested in robotics, and we learned it together. We built Roomba on steroids, we did tug-of-war, and we had a bunch of fun. And I saw, like, half of the kids in that class, they were like, “We’re done with the robots, we’ve been doing it for two marking periods, we’re good.” And the other half are like, “No, no, like, we want to build more.” And me and the one-half kind that didn’t want to do robots anymore, we sat together, they’re all big into sports, so they’re going to build and design different stadiums for different sports. So, we’ve got a soccer stadium going, we’ve got another one who is building Madison Square Garden: it’s so great.
I have one student who has taken me now for STEM and engineering, because we have STEM I, STEM II, and STEM III, and then I have my four-year engineering program. He came in the first day, and was like, “I don’t want to do engineering, I got put in here. I’ll sit through it, because you seem nice, but I didn’t ask to be put in there.” And now, he’s actually a junior, and he wants to pursue electrical engineering. We did that electrical project, and he loves wiring things and making things work.
Interview by Gregory Andrus
