A School Where STEM Is King
A selective, specialized high school in Baltimore uses an interdisciplinary approach that enables students to experience STEM as a way of life.
A visit to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute creates a strong impression: This is a place for doers.
Teachers and students at Poly, as it is known here, seem to gather up knowledge and information because they have a use for it. A student is doing background research for her two-year project with local scientists on cannibalism among blue crabs. A group of teenagers searches the Web for a design concept to improve a robot they are entering in a contest. And an aeronautics class discusses the afternoon’s weather forecast—as measured from the roof of the school—as a factor in flying several radio-controlled model helicopters.
That focus on applied information is a clue to the bigger purpose at this public school on the northern end of the Baltimore school district: To be a caldron for the blending disciplines known as STEM—science,...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or purchase this article.
Subscribe to Education Week and Save
Get a full year and save up to 45%!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
Sponsored Whitepapers
- Senior Director for Professional Issues
- AACTE, Washington, DC
- Executive Director of Business Resources and Organizational Effectiveness
- ICCSD, Iowa City, IA
- Foreign Trainer
- Disney English, China
- Administrative Vacancy: Assistant Superintendent of High Schools
- Baltimore County Public Schools, Baltimore County, MD
- Superintendent
- Limestone County Board of Education, Athens, AL
