Teachers Learn High-Tech Skills on Summer Jobs
With a Hello Kitty poster on the wall and daily motivational messages taped to the window, the tiny office that E’Leva Hughes and Patti Forster share looks more like a cheery classroom than a hard-driving Silicon Valley technology company.
That’s because Hughes and Forster are middle-school English teachers. But come September, these two will have plenty to tell their students about what they did on their summer vacations--thanks to an unusual program that puts Bay Area teachers to work at technology companies.
Despite the dramatic downturn in the region’s high-tech economy, the Silicon Valley nonprofit Industry Initiatives for Science and Math Education found jobs for 130 teachers this summer, a record for the 18-year-old program.
Hughes and Forster work for Synopsys Inc., an electronic design firm.
Teachers say they learn scientific and technological skills as well as a better understanding of how corporate America functions. That’s valuable insight that they can take back to their students.
For employers, the teachers bring a breath of fresh air and useful approaches to training and communicating with other employees.
In the case of Hughes and Forster, that has meant promoting their Synopsys Web site for information technology and training employees to use it. To get out the message, they launched a “road show” within the company, complete with massage therapists to help employees relax in the face of so much new information.
Hughes, a first-time fellow in the program who teaches eighth-grade language arts at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in San Francisco, will use her experience to create a more realistic business environment for her students.
She believes business skills will help them as they study social problems such as homelessness and drug abuse and try to come up with solutions.
To create a businesslike environment, she even plans to set up a teleconference between her students and the school principal.
“This gives me the opportunity to be the liaison between the corporate world and school. I want them to have options,” Hughes said.
Forster teaches seventh-grade English at Joaquin Moraga Intermediate School in Moraga. This summer marked her fourth year as a fellow in the program. In addition to her work for Synopsys, she created a Web page to help other teachers make their information more accessible on the Internet, and she filmed a documentary about Hughes’ experience at the nonprofit.
Each teacher in the program is paired with a mentor from a host company. The teachers also spend about five hours a week developing lesson plans for their school classrooms.
Those who want to participate in the program post their applications on the nonprofit’s Web site. Employers select their own fellows. This year there were three times as many applicants for the program as there were positions.
The program pays participants as much as $7,000 for their summer work, which is meant to help them meet the high cost of living in the Bay Area.
The extra income has enabled Charles Mosher, a sixth-year fellow who teaches high school technology in San Jose, to qualify for a mortgage on his Scotts Valley home.
“I think this program is more important than ever,” Mosher said. “After the baby boom of the 1950s, we hired a bunch of teachers. Now they’re all retiring. Those are the folks that got cheap houses. Now, we’re looking at a bunch of new teachers who are renting because they can’t afford homes.”
Teachers say they enjoy interacting with other adults for a change, but, by the end of the summer, most are eager to get back to their classrooms. A cubicle, no matter how cheerfully decorated, is a poor substitute for the lively give-and-take of a high-energy classroom, they said.
“You go from being in your own classroom, where you get to make all the big decisions about what’s going to happen in the course of the day, to the corporate world, where you’re generally just one little piece of the whole office,” said Deborah Frazier, a high school math teacher in Cupertino.
She just completed her third consecutive summer as a fellow at NASA’s Ames Research Lab in Mountain View.
“Other jobs don’t have the same emotional return as teaching,” Frazier said.
Kevin Guichard, a high school math teacher from Livermore who worked at Intel in Santa Clara this summer, agreed. “With kids, you’re always needed and you’re always moving,” he said. At a company, “it’s a lot more about the product.”
Nonetheless, when the product is a giant underground machine for smashing atoms, the product can be pretty cool. A San Jose high school chemistry teacher, Earl Roske, spent the summer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a facility he always wondered about as he drove past on the highway.
After spending a week at a training lab in Chicago, he’s been working with two physicists who are studying how a certain part of the accelerator’s equipment is aging.
“These guys don’t work individually; they work together. They’re just so geared toward solving problems and working in a group. That’s the kind of philosophy I want in my classroom,” Roske said.
“I began to think about how I can get my kids to work together to see lab as more of a collaboration.”
“It’s a win-win situation on our end,” said Rhodora Antonio, a recruiter for National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, which hired 11 teacher fellows this year.
“These people are very good communicators, both written and verbally. They’re used to having an audience every day, and communicating information in ways that people will understand.”
