It's a secret everybody seems to know: STEM can be a very, very lucrative field, with a touch of luck and a handful of job applications. Another secret everybody seems to know is that being a teacher is far from a lucrative career, even with a ton of luck. So why would people who are proficient enough in STEM knowledge bother to teach it? Why not make more money actually making something, engineering, or solving a millennium problem?
My parents and friends ask me this all the time, as may yours. Lots of people privilege money in their careers. Being a teacher challenges you to privilege something else. What is it, then? What drives someone to teach STEM, and when they do teach STEM, what is it that keeps them going?
My answer is impact, influence, and inclusion. This unintentionally alliterative combination drives me more than money ever could, and in fact it drives me more than individual curricula or units do, either. STEM offers teachers the opportunity to make a huge, huge connection with students and their passions, and that's empowering for both us as teachers and for our students. Let's dive a little deeper:
Impact: sure, I could go code for a software company. Maybe you could go work on some CRISPR gene editing or programming a telescope. All cool stuff, for sure. I see it another way, though: by sacrificing my individual role in the broader world of STEM and trading it for being a teacher, I get to help hundreds and hundreds of students feel inspired to make their own impact. I know what I could do, but to see all my students find that out for themselves and their futures is way more thrilling to me.
Influence: I've grown to have some strong opinions about STEM: precision, care, security, and ethics are tremendously important, for example. As a teacher, I get to share that directly with students and show them the importance of the things I've learned to care about, so that they can learn to form their own opinions, too. I don't want copies of myself, but I do want to make sure the students who pass through my classes know why it is I care about what I care about, so that they can form passions and opinions of their own.
Inclusion: STEM is a famously exclusive field that tends to be dominated by voices of white men. This is for many reasons, of course, but one of them is because of the lackluster-at-best inclusive experiences in STEM classes for students who aren't white men. As a STEM teacher, I have the opportunity to shift that narrative and to push for inclusion. I want to see all my students succeed in STEM and understand why it's so fun and important, and I want to see success especially in my women students and my students of color.
Being a STEM teacher means you can take the future of STEM into your own hands, in a way that is much more intimate and powerful than a non-academic environment can offer. Every STEM teacher is going to emphasize and privilege something different, but to have that thing that you focus on is what's important. There's no such thing as a STEM teacher without a goal and a dream for their students, and we should keep it that way. So, if you're a dreamer, if you have big aspirations for the future of STEM fields, teach, and share that with the world.