The Connection

School let out a week ago and Michael Zito has just retired after 29 years teaching AP Science at Yorktown High School. "I don't think it has really sunk in because it is summer. I got a little weepy saying goodbye especially to the freshmen. I always said, 'see you next year.'"

Zito has spent his whole teaching career at Yorktown. While he doesn't remember the first day, he does recall being very comfortable the first year since he had spent the previous five years in a lab. But he says one day he thought “'the lab's not for me.' I'm a people person and that's a big piece I will miss. My daily interactions with the students and coworkers will be hard to replace."

Zito reflects on changes he has seen in nearly three decades. "Kids are kids. Their attention span today is not there and their listening skills are not that good." He points to an iPhone sitting on the table.

He says grading has become a negotiation. "Students measure themselves by the grade they receive, not by what they learn. Parents, too." He says a phone call with parents was often hard to arrange when he first started teaching but now emails flow back and forth from parents as well as students all of the time.

He says his theory of teaching is to develop interpersonal relationships. "If kids aren't comfortable, they aren't going to learn." He continues, Yorktown is known as a high achieving high school with many families from an upper socio-economic status. But there are challenges at both ends of the scale. "Special Ed kids and second language learners get lost at Yorktown while it is a challenge to teach kids at the upper end who get easily bored."

Instead of memorization, Zito has adopted a Socratic teaching method where students ask and answer questions to develop critical thinking skills. He uses a lot of case studies. "One of my frustrations, and what pushed me out, was that we don't teach kids to think. We use the SOL checklist. I don't like the direction of the current administration in Arlington. I'm doing all of this stuff and I've never been observed." He adds, "There is a fair bit of posturing.”

A case in point is the new personalized learning approach, "a great buzz word but we don't know what that means and haven't had any training." He says there is supposed to be a committee to look at it but they just keep adding layers of bureaucracy and the teacher get ignored."

He has seen the content of science change. "When I first began, for instance, we would do a case study on genetically modified food asking the question about whether these structures should be released into the environment for testing. It was a discussion in ethics. Now," he says, "the genie is out of the bottle and the question is not whether, but transgenesis," the transfer of genes between species.

Zito teaches AP Environmental Science which didn't exist before 1998. "It's more about the big picture than reductionism. It's about making connections that are more important than the pieces. For instance, climate change, very complex. You have to understand how the atmosphere works, gas laws, physics, density." As an example, "we ask the question why San Francisco and Washington D.C ., cities on approximately the same latitudes, have climates that are so different."

"The technology today is wonderful." He used to work with lectures, an overhead projector and a chalkboard. Zito says three years ago they started giving every freshman at Yorktown a MacBook Air. "It's pretty cool to see kids use it as a tool." But one of his students didn't receive one and since computers were used for everything including assignments and feedback, it was a problem. After two weeks, she still hadn't received her computer so he made another inquiry. Still no response. "So I went to the School Board. All of a sudden we were flooded with computers because it was a problem other places in the school. But I was reprimanded for not following the chain of command."

Now teachers use the interactive white boards for presentation, videos. And notes can be saved. "Everything is going electronic so you don't have to carry around paper." It is especially relevant in science where there are electronic sensors for collecting data. "It used to be we measured photosynthesis by counting bubbles; now with the probes we can measure the carbon dioxide and oxygen. Very professional. We were doing something interesting on blood types but I was told not to touch it because it's not on the SOL."

Zito's advice for a new teacher today would be to focus on what you are doing in the classroom. Be prepared and enjoy your time with the kids. "Have an assumption of good will. You get what you give and you can't demand respect. And smile."