As schools reopen across the country in the coming month, thousands of teachers may find that they have the most interesting stories to tell when students ask them: Now, what did you do this summer?
Helped design parts for nuclear weapons. Worked in a diesel engine factory. Learned how to make paper bags and cardboard boxes. Got a temporary job in a potato chip plant.
Teachers have been doing these and other jobs as part of a growing effort, supported by corporate interests and federal funds, to give them a firsthand look at the skills needed in the modern workplace. The summer jobs in the private sector and government and at nonprofit agencies help teachers better relate their lessons to the real world.
For most teachers, such "school to work" internships, which can last a few days to a couple of months, are a first look at the business world. Many public school teachers went directly from college to the classroom and have never done any other professional work.
"It kind of updates a teacher's knowledge of the real world out there," says Alan Hershey, a researcher who has studied school to work programs. "Teachers are pretty isolated from the careers that their students are going to go into."
What some teachers learn on the factory floor or in the office, for instance, can be useful to the one-third of high school graduates who don't continue their educations and go straight to work.
But teachers' workplace experiences also can shape everything from basic lessons taught the youngest students to the advanced mathematics courses for college-bound students who wonder aloud about the practical uses of calculus.
Take Deborah Fisher, a kindergarten teacher in Springfield, Mo. She spent a couple of weeks observing factory workers at Springfield ReManufacturing Corp., which reconditions diesel engines. "I actually had to buy steel-toed boots to go into this place," she recalls.
What does heavy manufacturing have to do with teaching kindergartners?
More than most people imagine. Fisher notes that one task 5-year-olds are supposed to master is "how to take things apart and put things back together"--exactly what some grown-ups do for a living at the former division of International Harvester. Another task that factory workers and kindergarten students have in common is sorting objects of different shapes.
Fisher intends to have her students work on both skills this school year using an assortment of surplus nuts, bolts and washers donated by Springfield ReManufacturing.
At the other end of the academic pipeline, Shawn Berry, a high school math teacher who lives in Lawrence, Kan., says his two weeks working at a Honeywell plant in Kansas City, Mo., will change how he teaches calculus and trigonometry. He plans to show students how the math has applications in real life--now that he has discovered a few on his internship.
To complete his assignments at the plant, which makes components for nuclear weapons under Energy Department contracts, Berry actually used some of those formulas that signify nothing practical in the minds of many students.
"The project I was asked to work on was to calculate how much energy goes into the end of a fiber optic cable," he says.
How to find the answer? Good old-fashioned calculus. Another assignment, designing a cloverleaf-shaped piece of metal, required trigonometry.
"Being a math teacher, I always enjoyed math for the sake of math," Berry explains. "But I know a lot of students don't tune into what they're learning unless they are presented with a purpose behind it."
No one knows exactly how many teachers participate in the internships (sometimes called "externships"), which provide either modest pay or academic credit. The National School-to-Work Office says about 17,300 employers offer the jobs sometime during the year, most often during the summer.
The office, jointly funded by the Education and Labor departments, says the number of employers offering teacher internships has almost tripled since President Clinton signed a 1994 law that provided seed money--about $230 million this year--to create local projects designed to better prepare students for the modern workplace.
The internship programs exist in nearly every state. In Maryland, Prince George's County and Baltimore County have them, as does Norfolk in Virginia.
One of the oldest programs is in Portland, Ore., where more than 800 teachers have done summer work at 200 businesses over the last dozen years.
Steve Rhodes, who teaches middle school science in a Portland suburb, spent three weeks this summer touring and observing the operation of Willamette Industries Inc., a major producer of forestry products.
"The internship provided me with a lot of information I didn't know--how to make a [paper] bag, how to make a [cardboard] box and make it stronger," says Rhodes, who has been most intrigued by the last discovery. "Basically, the more corners, the stronger the box is going to be. An octagon is going to be stronger than a regular box."
His students will test that principle and try their own hands at making paper and boxes this school year during four weeks of forestry-related lessons that Rhodes has created based on his internship.
In Jackson, Tenn., Myrtiss Morris heads back to Northside High School today with four weeks of experience inside a Procter & Gamble factory that makes Pringles potato crisps. A teacher for 23 years, she had never before worked outside the classroom, a fact skeptical students sometimes mentioned whenever she insisted they needed to master math to get a good job.
"They would say in the past, 'Miss Morris, you've never worked in a factory so you don't know,' " she recalls.
More than any practical knowledge about chip making, Morris plans to adopt some Procter & Gamble practices by urging students to adopt a "zero defects" attitude toward their school work and making them write explanations for failures on tests.
Most of her students head straight into the work force after high school, and now she knows better what will be expected of them after observing a basic skills course for new employees during her internship.
"It regenerated me, and I'm ready to go," Morris says. "I want my students to see that in the real world there's a basis for everything we do in high school."
