Dallas Cherry Jr.

STEM Department Chair and Teacher, Maya Angelou Public Charter School

I believe STEM is the future, point-blank period. I just want everybody to do it. I guess the reason why I do it is because I don’t feel like you have to be the smartest, the brightest—anybody can do it. In college I sucked at [it]. I didn’t have the necessary study habits, I didn’t have the tools, I didn’t have the equipment in high school to do these things. But eventually it just made sense and I didn’t give up.

The beauty of science is really seeing that it is all trial and error. If you didn’t get it right the first time, try it again. You’ll get it right the next time. I feel like that is a life skill that can translate everywhere, to even students and people just making mistakes in their life, finding ways to fix the mistakes to do better the next time.

I’ve seen students that are like, “Nah, [STEM] ain’t me, I don’t want to do that at all.” And I’ve seen other students say, “Yo, yeah, I really want that.”

During our science fair, a student built our underwater ROV [remotely operated vehicle]. We had to do some pipe cutting, we had to do some soldering. We had to literally just construct this thing, from drawing it to putting it together to now operating this thing under some water. I had a student tell me, “Hey, because of this, I want to go to school for engineering. I want to do this. I didn’t know I wanted to do this before you exposed me to this thing.”

I find that oftentimes my students—a lot of students—don’t want to go to college, or they don’t have that as a pathway. My goal has always been what can I do right now, if I’m the last person that they’ll see as a science teacher, to show them something STEM? How can we expose them to trades and expose them to activities and expose them to just something different than they’re used to?

I think success looks differently for all of us, and I would just love for them to find out what would make them happy or what they want to do. Things like attendance, testing, and even sometimes grading completely ignores the full picture of the student. We only expect students to be one way when there’s a full spectrum, there’s a full rainbow of how our students can be successful. Success doesn’t look like one thing.

As told to Rachel Kenney, with photography by Alyssa Schukar for the Urban Institute. Research and logistical support provided by Karishma Furtado and Victoria Nelson.