Teaching Technology Gives Her a Thrill

When Claire Small embarked on a career change at the age of 35, she thought about becoming a teacher. As often happens when you discuss the subject of teaching, she immediately thought “‘Oh look, you’ll get your whole summer off.’ I thought I wouldn’t work as hard,” she recalls. Looking back, she now reports, “That didn’t turn out to be true.”

But Small did find a new passion in life, one where she gets to play engineer and also spread the word about it to youngsters, at the same time helping society fill its need for well-trained engineers. Now 46, the electrical engineer teaches engineering and physics at the architecture and engineering academy in Springdale High School in Springdale, Arkansas.

Small hails from the small town of Robbinsville, North Carolina in the western part of the state near the Tennessee border. After getting a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Arkansas,
she began a typical engineering career by working for Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas in the company’s Equipment Group. There she tested and redesigned various circuits, systems, and technologies for military applications. One major job had her working on a phase array radar, a stationary radar used on the outside of fighter aircraft. Her work involved developing gallium arsenide integrated circuits that work at high frequencies.

After two years at Texas Instruments, Small moved onto Ithaco, a firm in Ithaca, New York started by engineers who graduated from Cornell. Ithaco had two divisions, one for aerospace and another for instruments, and she worked on the aerospace side directing the design, manufacture, and testing of attitude control systems for satellites.

While Small liked the job at Ithaco, things transpired that would lay the groundwork for a career change. “In a smaller company, you tend to be exposed to a lot more stuff, and so you tend to work a lot more hours. When I left there, I was doing a lot of non-engineering management things like negotiating contracts and managing people, things pretty far from where I started in design. And that involved a lot of travel. Also, a couple companies were looking at buying Ithaco, and it was probably going to be moved.”

“Several things happened all at once,” as Small tells it. Family matters entered the picture. “My youngest daughter was getting ready to start school. And my husband had stayed at home with our children, and he was thinking about working. So the fact I was probably going to have to move anyway, and my husband wanted to go into the workforce, and my job kept me away from my family a lot and wasn’t really where I started made me think about it, kind of reassess. ‘What do I want to do?’”

“I have a lot of family in Arkansas, and I went to college there. I had some friends there who said ‘you could teach physics and math.’ So I researched that and found out it might be something I’d like to try,” Small says in describing her venture into teaching. “When I was younger, I had thought teaching would be a fun thing to do. We figured my husband and I could get by with a much lower cost of living, and the drastic change in income wouldn’t hurt us quite as bad.”

With the decision made, Small moved to Arkansas and obtained her Arkansas teacher’s certificate in 1994. At the West Campus Technical Center at Fayetteville High School in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
she taught physics, incorporating project-based learning to cover concepts of velocity, acceleration, electricity, projectile motion, light, and quantum theory. She also taught math classes such as algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

The state of Arkansas has experimented with academy schools, which consist of a technical program like engineering with core classes such as English revolving around it. West Campus Technical Center offers technical and vocational training in fields such as engineering, business, horticulture, welding, auto body, hospitality, and child care. It consists of students in grades 10 through 12. Admission requires a minimum GPA and teacher recommendations. Seventeen school districts could send students to the center.

How did Small like her new calling? “I really love teaching high school kids. I’m well suited for that. I like constantly learning new stuff and figuring out new things. So I enjoy teaching the engineering classes,” she reports. “And the kids are just a hoot. They’re so funny. And then there’s the kids you influence or turn on to some concept or something that steers them toward some interesting technology. That’s always fun. I know kids now who have graduated from college, and they’ll call me up, and that’s really cool.”

Small left West Campus Technical Center in 2004 because it was taken over by the local community college. They had a different focus, and issues of merging two schools arose. She moved on to Springdale High School, 10 miles north of Fayetteville, to teach physics and digital electronics. “Sometimes things just click together, and it seemed like the right move,” she reveals.

Springdale High School started an architecture and engineering academy in 2003 and offers similar classes to Fayetteville. The school’s machine shop was converted to classrooms, making way for a computer lab and areas for demonstrations and presentations. They have computer numerical control (CNC) equipment and other fabricating and testing apparatus for wood, metal, and plastics. The academy focuses on qualities employers look for in engineering employees, and they get feedback from an advisory group of local engineers and architects.

Small may love teaching engineering classes, but how do students respond to them? “I think they really love it. In Fayetteville, when I left there, all my classes were full, and they’re elective classes,” she reports. Some kids give up band or gym for engineering classes. “All the kids really like it because it’s project based.” As an example, she cites a computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) class, where they learn how to program a milling machine and mill different objects. “They’re using state-of-the-art technology and software and learning how to problem solve like an engineer. They’re not easy classes, but because they enjoy it, they work harder at it.”

Part of Small’s teaching involves a curriculum developed by Project Lead the Way (PLTW), an organization started with the goal of putting more technology in classrooms. They have six different engineering classes, most of which offer college credit through Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Over 1000 schools around the country teach their classes. She also serves on the PLTW Advisory Board consisting of parents, community members, and university professors who discuss classes and curriculum and goals for the classes.

Going a step further, Small has become a master teacher for PLTW and teaches digital electronics to other high school teachers. This comes in the form of intensive two-week classes -- taught over summer break -- with lots of hands-on work at colleges such as RIT, Purdue, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Through her teaching, Small has developed a perspective on why we need to introduce teenagers to engineering. “It seems to me we don’t have enough women in engineering, and we really live in a high tech society,” she says. All kids should be familiar with today’s technology, not just the brainiacs, she adds. “I don’t see enough kids looking at technology as a field. I think sometimes we make it too hard for them. I think our high schools should do more on having our kids explore different careers.”

It becomes obvious Small is doing her part to turn kids on to technological careers. And she enjoys doing it . . . even if she doesn’t get summers off and has to work as hard as ever.

For more information on Project Lead the Way, visit www.pltw.org