I Love Teaching So Much ... I Quit | Tawana Weicker | TEDxTryon

the fuel that's in this bottle is the same type of fuel that's outside in my Volkswagen Jetta diesel and it's the same type of fuel that's in this Boeing 727 now while you may think it's strange that I'm carrying around a flask of fuel you're going to think it's even more strange that I can take a drink I heard someone over here who trying to suppress the gag reflex it's okay it's non-toxic it's biodegradable it's made from waste cooking oil and in fact it doesn't even have much taste but sometimes it smells like it has hints of crispy one times or notes of tortilla chips and this particular batch smells like straight-up tater tots and french fries because the students at our high school took the leftover cafeteria oil from the high school in the middle school and turned it into biodiesel and use it on the school campus and it's not just backyard chemistry because boeing is working on the same process now I'm going to tell you how a student inspired a teacher and inspired other students and other teachers and a school board and principals and superintendents to embrace this program and bring it to campus but I'm also going to tell you how a student and this fuel fueled my decision to quit teaching a job that I really loved and I need you to understand something I'm trying to get back in the school maybe not as an English teacher but as a mentor a part of the supply chain to help keep the program going and I'm hoping to bring some of you with me now the story spans 15 years so I'm going to have to pick it up and it's going to have to get a little fast and furious in 1997 I became a high school English teacher at the age of 33 career change some of my students were disappointed first day of class a few of my seniors went what we thought we're getting a new teacher I'm like guys I'm older and wiser I know what you need to know I've been there I've been a waitress I've worked for a couple of big companies I know what it's like to interview to take tests to get a job and I just finished up graduate school and they told me there my teaching professors how hard it was going to be to get you to do well on those state exams to raise your AC T scores and to keep your attention and not bore you to tears because you've got other things going on so I'm prepared and I was actually I was pretty good at it I was strategically planning to entertain my students to be the pilot of the classroom the captain of entertainment so they would never be bored when they were studying the fifteen uses of the comma and subject verb agreement I would go home after grading papers and I would dig into finding YouTube videos and even TED Talks what could I show them music to grab their attention before I slap them with indefinite pronouns and Elizabethan sonnet and I don't know I think I've got some students out here if they realize that I was being a comedian to try to entice them to do well on those state exams to get where they wanted to go and I would even go as far as dressing up as a character from the movie The Matrix and taking some martial art stands and rolling across the floor and they would say Oh mrs. Waker we finally get to watch a movie in your class because you never let us watch movies and I would say oh no my little grasshoppers we're reading the screenplay all 300 pages and we're going to figure out how these Wachowski brothers could finally craft an extended metaphor using a compound-complex sentence and then we'll watch the movie the edited version it's amazing what a pair of sunglasses will do and how they will make you feel cool so for ten years I focused on what was going on inside my classroom because this time on task no money for field trips liability issues we can't get off campus very often and I've got to do what I've got to do in that 90 minutes inside my four walls with all those books and something started happening and I didn't even realize that over ten years I disconnected myself severed that in biblical cord I had with my community and when I came from that brought it to the classroom I put my head down and drilled in on the tests and the papers and the curriculum and the books and the poetry and what they needed to do after they graduated and was I teaching them what they needed to know going on out there in that real world that had just passed me by for the last ten years and then I had a student teach me a lesson in 2007 a student Elizabeth in my senior English class decided to do a project on biofuels taking her family's waste cooking or from a local barbecue restaurant right here and turning it into fuel and when she wrote her paper and I read it and she brought her visuals to class and she talked about it we were all jealous like man what a cool project and it's going on right now all over the globe and when she stood in front of her own community of judges and took her own sip of biofuels I was like man I got to learn how to do this Liz you got to introduce me to your teacher so that he can teach me how to do this and she did I met Bob biodiesel Bob lives in our community and when I went and met him he decided look little lady you hang with me and you'll be slicker than snot now that is an ugly metaphor but it's true I became really really slick after my own graduation project with biodiesel Bob so when I went home and I presented this to my husband and I said look cheers Bob I said look honey look what I made and he said that's not going in my truck and I said that's okay I've picked out a 2006 Jetta TDI five-speed diesel it's in Colorado and I need to go get it because I'm going to start making fuel and we did and I said that corner of our shop where the tractor sits I need that because I got some equipment coming to the house and we cleared it out and we did and then after about two years I became really really good at it and in 2009 I had mentored 15 other high school and college students on both your chemistry other students were going oh my gosh are you the teacher that's driving the car that smells like french fries I want we can we like it lunch can you go crank your car up I want to learn how to do that where can we learn hey I've got a family member at Chapel Hill that's studying this stuff or a community college very relevant science so we decided the science teachers got on board they learned the process we did a two-week class and so many students wanted to learn it we decided let's have proof of concept and commercialization let's see if we can get this on the campus so we wrote the curriculum the state accepted it we went out and we visited other local community universities where they were doing this type of science and bioenergy projects and they even came to our high school graduate students and professors and taught our students and teachers how to customize this science to meet the needs of what could actually work at our high school and said they would feed us projects and let us Co work and collaborate on projects that they were doing and if you'll notice in this picture the teacher is standing back right beside of one of our students and he's learning right then and there so we all became students now you may be thinking oh wow how cool is this this is extra curriculum well it's not extra it's supposed to be standard operating procedure now this is a slide that the tedtalk coaches tell you not to put in your presentation because it's too busy it's a whirling vortex of information a cyclone but you know what teachers and schools are supposed to be offering this every day preschool high school college cultural and global awareness creativity entrepreneurship we're supposed to be helping our students become and believe they could be entrepreneurs now when I was in school it was the three RS reading writing arithmetic and if I could sew a pillowcase and home Act which I couldn't but my friend did dress out for PE you were doing pretty well things have changed schools need to be offering the opportunity to practice this and develop it you don't teach it you have to live it and do it without fear of failure and I decided you know what I don't know if if I'm really preparing my students to be ready for this when they graduate well after we started the biofuels program in 2011 it became a self-sustaining science curriculum community was helping foundations had given us awarded us money to support the program and things were going well and if you will see in this picture look closely because I'm not in there I'm back in my classroom they're doing it without me but guess why I'm down in my basement with my own little lab still making biofuels and working with trans esterification and working with agriculture material and bringing my formulas and concoctions to class and giving it out to the gym and to the local humane society and some local veterinarians and they're using the product giving me feedback so I'm working hard and pretending to be an entrepreneur because I've been bitten by this biodiesel bug then my students started one day one of my students his name is Jake I taught him in ninth grade and again in 12th so he had seen this whole missus Wiker biofuel thing for four years and he said you know you've even got a trademark that the art teacher across the hallway did and I had gotten some students to do research projects with me so they knew I was working on this after grading papers and Jake said this come on mrs. Waker when are you going to do something and I stopped for a minute I thought you know am i being a hypocrite do I need to become a student of the 21st century and really feel in my bones what it's like not to know what you're going to do after graduation where are you going to get the money to do something we're sending these seniors out into the unknown and say trust if we've taught you what you need to know but yet they haven't had the opportunity to experience and apply it so I jumped I quit I jumped out of the classroom and it was ugly I thought I was prepared with my hard hat in my harness but I wasn't but I knew that I needed to walk the walk and so I immerse myself in engineering and let me tell you I'm the odd woman out in the bioenergy workshops and meetings because I'm an English teacher bringing sonnet ambach pentameter and not thermodynamic chemistry so I am watching a lot of YouTube videos teaching myself and barring some of my students chemistry books and that bewildered stupefied look that's on my face I carried around about four years I even rented an old RV much like a college student in a dorm living off-campus left my community packed up and went to a biodiesel industrial site four hours away and spent four months exploring both you and all the equipment needed and after four months I decided I don't know what else to do I don't know where to go I've done all I can do and I thought you know what I'm feeling a little bit like Dorothy in the Land of Oz so I said you know what I'm going home and I clicked my heels and I packed up and I came back to Polk County best thing I ever did because the same people who helped the high-school project helped me and my fledgling proof of concept commercialization project of trying to start a company and I started smiling a lot and students did internships and I became part of the supply chain the resources and the raw materials that our high school needed to help sustain and maybe grow this bioenergy program I wanted to be a part of it now this is where I get to the point of asking you to come with me we have had more thousands probably five thousand seniors to graduation projects since it started in the state in Polk County in the state of North Carolina and all over the United States there's an opportunity to mentor a student and many people in Polk County have done that and there are businesses who have resources that could help support a teacher's idea or a project that maybe the school wants to work on or maybe you could take in a senior or a high school student for an internship there's plenty of opportunities for that now I want to introduce you to someone I've never met him but every time I watch one of his TED Talks it is like an injection of steel into my spine his name is Sir Ken Robinson and he is a global education and creativity expert and he says this now in this room this room right here there are people who represent extraordinary resources combined with extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education we all care about education we're all stakeholders in it and we can all participate locally always worried about being a boring teacher and if if anyone out there that hears this is a boring teacher and you're boring and you don't care then you need to do something about it and if you don't want to do something about it then you need to quit but we live I live in a community that embraces change and dynamic projects and encourages us there are students who wake up every day hungry for knowledge and something is interesting and hoping that an English teacher doesn't bore him or her to tears parents wake up every day and cross their fingers that they're sending their child to a school that's going to get them prepared for the 21st century in the future and schools and superintendents are embracing communities and saying we need help we all know about buying local and eating local and we can educate local we can do what we can with what we have right here right now it's too important not to thank

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 485,015

Rating: 4.8446012 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Classroom, Education, Entrepreneurship, Personal growth, Recycling, Start-up, Students, Teaching

Id: 4vrGO8Pa-s0

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2015