Teaching Good Habits

My love for the outdoors is what inspires and drives me on a daily basis to teach students about keeping physically fit and the benefits from the natural environment around them. It has been a realization of mine that children today do not get outside to just play and socialize with friends. Wanting to find a way to address this issue two colleagues and I applied and received a Fund For Teacher grant in 2008. This grant allowed us to explore Norway and understand the healthy life style of the Norwegians.  Our trip included hiking the Fjords, visiting an outdoor school, meeting and speaking to people about their love for the outdoors. Once we were back from our 12 day excursion we hit the ground running excited to start a new way of teaching physical activity to our students. Our idea was simply called the Outdoor Classroom. We took our students out to explore a local park near our school and quickly discovered that many of our students had never been to the park before. This fact propelled us to further develop and tweak our program to fit the needs of our students. The once a month outdoor classrooms are spent hiking, exploring, orienteering, snowshoeing, team building and journaling. Students are learning that the park lands have so much to offer and it’s free recreational fun right in their own backyards. 

In addition to the Outdoor Classroom I have helped to establish other programs that complement our outdoor concept. Our school is a “Safe Routes to School” school which is a national program that promotes safely walking and bicycling to school. We are encouraging our students to walk or bike to school rather than be driven which supports physical activity and a greener environment. Our school participates in special events sponsored by Safe Routes to School which includes the National and Massachusetts Walk To School Days, celebrating students walking or biking to and from school.

Department of Energy Hosts Women In STEM Tweet Up

Ed. note: This is cross-posted from the U.S. Department of Energy 

Jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are high-paying, innovation-driven, and mission-essential. Yet while women have half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, 76 percent of STEM jobs are held by men. This gap has been seen throughout the past decade. We need to take a close look at the gender disparity in these fields that are so critical to completing the mission of the Department of Energy, and encourage and support women to take part in STEM positions. 

Join us for a conversation about women in STEM on Twitter on Thursday, March 22 at 2:30pm EDT by following the hashtag #STEM.  

You'll be able to ask experts how we can advance women's education and empowerment to bring women into STEM careers. 

The Energy Department's (@ENERGY) Assistant Secretary for Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability Patricia Hoffman and Technology Transfer Coordinator Dr. Karina Edmonds will host the Tweet Up. 

The Department of Education's Faith Based and Community Partnerships Director Reverend Brenda Girton-Mitchell (@edpartners) will join the conversation, along with Congresswoman Eddie B. Johnson (@RepEBJ), Argonne National Lab Women in Science and Technology Leader Kawtar Hafidi (@argonne), the White House Initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders (@WhiteHouseAAPI), NASA's Mamta Patel Nagaraja (@womenNASA), the Department of Agriculture's Dr. Jenna Jadin & Dr. Dionne Fortson Toombs  (@USDA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Education Director Louisa Koch (@usNOAAgov) and the Department of Labor's Sara Manzano-Diaz at (@usDOL).

You can send us your questions before or during the event via Twitter to @Energy using the hashtag #STEM or by email to diversity@hq.doe.gov

Gloria B. Smith is Deputy Director, Office of Diversity & Inclusion for the U.S. Department of Energy

Transforming Lives through Running—One Child at a Time

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”–Mahatma Ghandi

It is with humility that I am honored to be a White House Champion of Change. The calling to serve has been passed down from my mother, Peggy Weems, who was a special-education teacher’s assistant in Queens for over twenty years. On weekends, she would gather my sisters and me as she did work in our local church, and those memories were my foundation, shaping my innate desire to be of service to others. Like Ghandi, my desire to “be that change” led me to the New York Road Runners—an organization that has helped me bring physical fitness to my students so that we can eradicate childhood obesity, one child at a time.

I first came to the New York Road Runners in 2004, under the leadership of  Cliff Sperber, when Loraine Pitteruff and I, both middle-school teachers, found ourselves witnessing the effects of our students’ inactivity. Besides the physical weight gain, a kind of lethargy and reluctance to take risks permeated the classroom. At the same time, we were seeing how the all-too-common tendency in urban schools towards academic progress often came at the expense of physical education. As such, the only opportunities our school offered were a girls’ and boys’ basketball team, which presumed a base level of fitness that many of our students didn’t possess. Searching NYRR online yielded information about the development of a youth division, and our program took off from there.