Dear Parents of Florida K-12 Students,
Your job as parents is tougher than it was when my wife and I brought our three kids up through the K-12 system. Our youngest graduated high school in 2014, before the pandemic and when being civil was simply a matter of acknowledging the humanity of others in our hearts and in our conduct.
The pandemic hammered students, parents and teachers. I wish I could say that everyone and everything has returned to normal. But it’s clear from my experiences in my college physics classroom that they have not. Some students still thrive. But others struggle with both skill level and belief in themselves and others. And I work at a university that is quite selective – Florida State University. I can only imagine that things look worse outside of the bubble in which I work.
You must be worried about the physical, emotional and spiritual health of your children. And you should be. I’m going to ask you to do something that is much more difficult than it was when my own children were K-12 students. I’m going to ask you to encourage your children to aim high, even if it involves risking failure.
Students can aim high in lots of ways. They can audition for a lead role in a theater production at their high school. Or train hard to start on their school’s soccer team, or to qualify for the state high school championship in swimming, cross country or track. Or to provide transformative writing for their school’s newspaper. Or take Advanced Placement courses in psychology (yes, that will be allowed in Florida this year) or art. Those are all wonderful things to do.
I would like to ask you to encourage your student to aim high by preparing for success in a college STEM major like engineering, biology, meteorology, astrophysics or computer science. What does that involve? It’s not that complicated, actually. If they take strong high school courses in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus and succeed in those courses, they are ready to go. My colleague Simone Hruda from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering constantly reminds me that not taking calculus in high school isn’t fatal. But being behind in math often extends the amount of time it takes to earn an engineering degree beyond four years.
And parents often underestimate the importance of taking high school chemistry and physics courses, in part because they can hear from other parents or even teachers or counselors that these courses aren’t important for students who might want to be engineers or scientists. I have students who skip those high school courses in my FSU college physics classes, so I can tell you this authoritatively: Taking physics in high school matters a lot. Every year, the STEM career dreams of some students die in my classroom because they cannot overcome the disadvantage of showing up unprepared.
I’m sure taking chemistry in high school has the same impact on a student’s performance in college chemistry as high school physics does on college physics performance because there is good research that says so. On the average, a student who takes a college physics or college chemistry course without having the corresponding high school course as preparation earns one full letter grade lower in the college course. Some of these unprepared students survive, anyway. Others don’t.
More recent research backs that up.
Maybe your child is focused on a different field, one that is not a STEM area. I’m going to share a story about a student who arrived at FSU having auditioned her way into my university’s piano performance program. To achieve at the level that allowed her to be admitted to the piano performance program, this student had many thousands of hours of practice under her belt to build upon her musical gift. But at the end of a year in the FSU piano performance program, this gifted student decided that she didn’t want to pursue a career in music. She wanted something else. She wanted to be a physicist.
Did that work out for this student? Yes, because in high school she had kept her options open by taking chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus. She was an excellent physics major who completed her bachelor’s degree in style and went on to work for a tech firm after graduation.
My message is this: Young people change their minds in college (one of our kids did). But to be successful in their new path, they must be prepared for it. Does your high school student want to be a novelist? That’s an awesome aspiration. But what if she changes her mind and decides in college that she wants to be a physician or meteorologist? To really be free to choose those paths, she must be prepared for them. I suggest you make sure she is.
Godspeed this year.
Bridge to Tomorrow 