I would say I am a bit of a documentary nerd. I love watching documentaries because I feel they are such an easy and engaging way to learn about new topics or hear peoples’ stories. So, it is safe to say I really enjoyed watching the Most Likely to Succeed documentary by Ted Dintersmith.

I truly believe the best gift a teacher can give their students is the space to find their passions and act on them. I believe in this gift because I have experienced it first hand. When I started high school I was this shy little girl who told herself she “wasn’t going to get involved with the school and was just going to fly under the radar for four years”. However, that all changed when a met my home room teacher. She became my “school mom” and she supported me through every up and down high school brought. Undoubtedly, she shaped who I am today because she helped me find my passions and gave me opportunities to grow with those passions. The space to live out my passions has brought me some of my proudest achievements. The teachers at High Tech High gave every single one of their students that gift. And we all watched them go on to create marvelous projects that I would guess are some of their proudest achievements too. The question then becomes do we need to design schools to be like High Tech High in order to have students act on their passions?

While I think High Tech High is a magical and innovative school, it also scares me a little bit as a future educator. The documentary argues that we need to begin moving away from the “artificial system” we call school because it is no longer setting up students for success in our rapidly changing work force. Further, they argue that we need to be designing schools that foster creativity and critical thinking like they do in High Tech High. As a future educator, I don’t disagree with their argument. I think we definitely need to be teaching kids skills that will be applicable once they are done school. However, it is uncomfortable to think about uprooting a system that is so deeply engrained in all our lives. When I reflect on my on schooling, I loved school and I loved the way I was taught. I was/am the type of person that thrives in our structured education system. Despite my love for school, I understand that the system does not work for everyone. Some students that I went to school with probably would have liked school a lot more if they went somewhere like High Tech High. It seems a divide is being created between students depending on if they like exploratory learning or structured learning, which makes me wonder. In five or ten years will we have different categories of schools and students will choose how they want to learn? If so, what will my role as a teacher be in each school? What I will be expected to teach and how I will be expected to teach it? I think a change in the entire education system has be rumbling for a long time, so I expect it will happen sometime during my teaching career. I just hope that when it does we don’t swing too far to the other side. I hope we can create a system that includes and meets everyone’s needs.

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