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STEP fellows stress applied knowledge to high schoolers

David Terraso
Institute Communications and Public Affairs

Each day, millions of high school students across America look up at the equation-covered chalkboards in their math and science classes and think, “When the heck am I ever going to use this stuff?” For many, the answer is never. Thanks to a group of graduate students from Georgia Tech, however, students in six metro Atlanta high schools are learning how to use those classroom lessons to develop a career.

“Many of these kids have no idea of what they want to do when they get out of high school,” said Sundiata Jangha, a 27-year-old African-American doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Tech. Jangha is a fellow in Georgia Tech’s Student and Teacher Enhancement Partnership (STEP), a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded program now in its second year.

As a STEP fellow, he spends at least 10 hours a week teaching general chemistry along with accelerated physics and chemistry at the predominately African-American Cedar Grove High School in south DeKalb County. He, along with 11 other fellows, has spent the past year working with teachers in one of six metro Atlanta high schools.

As graduate students not long out of high school, said Jangha, “we can connect with the students in ways that the school’s teachers can’t.” Plus they can show the students how to use concepts discussed in class in our research projects. Seeing firsthand how these seemingly dense subjects are used in research and the business world helps students make connections between what they’re studying and the real world, he said.

“One of the real strengths of the STEP program is that it helps fill in the gaps of the school’s curricula,” said Marion Usselman, co-principal investigator of STEP at Tech and research scientist at the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC). “In addition to helping the teachers with the core subjects, the fellows mentor the students. They show them why those subjects are important and how they can use what they’re learning in class to pursue college, graduate school and a career.”

Tech’s STEP program is jointly administered by the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) and CEISMC. In 2001, Tech’s first year in the program, 25 graduate students applied for slots as one of the 12 fellows. This past year, the number of applications rose to 40. For 2003-2004, there are 55 students applying to be STEP fellows.

Tech’s current NSF grant ends at the end of spring semester 2004. Donna Llewellyn, principal investigator of STEP at Tech and director of CETL, said they are pursuing a second grant to continue their funding for another five years, giving Tech additional time to find ways to make the program — or some aspects of it — a permanent fixture.

Getting students on a college and career path is vital to their success, said Jangha. “I try to get my students to think about what they want to do when they graduate from high school. So many of them have such a broad range of career ideas: fireman, policeman, astronaut. That’s great when you’re six, but at this point you need to narrow your choices and find out what it takes to get there,” he explained.

At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Jangha is an imposing presence in the classroom. Though well-liked by the students, he often asks and expects more of them than they would like to give, said Mike Pastirik, one of Jangha’s teachers at Cedar Grove. “But he asks good things and, in the long run, the students step up.”

“Being an outsider, I’m allowed to be harder on the students academically than the teachers,” said Jangha. “I’m an excuse buster. I tell the students, ‘If you’re not performing, excuses don’t matter.’”

Doing more than the minimum, Jangha says, is one ethic he’s trying to instill in his students. “High school kids are minimalists. They do as little as possible. If the assignment is to do numbers one, three, five and seven, they do one, three, five and seven. I try to teach them the benefits of doing the even-numbered problems. It never occurs to them that doing problem number two could help them understand number three.”

Not surprisingly, Jangha said he hopes to be a college professor some day. Through his participation in STEP, he’s hoping to gain a better understanding of his future students, both on a cultural level as well as what the high schools are teaching them.

Approved by the Office of External Affairs on 09/24/97
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