Industrial technology teacher at Washington Irving Middle School Mike Hatcher marched around the industrial technology lab, getting the students acclimated to computer assisted drawing, more commonly known as Auto-CAD. His vocabulary included "angle distance, lengths and directions."
"We're mastering the polar communications system," he told the class. "Say I'm mastering auto-CAD. Somebody name an input device," he said.
"Keyboard," came from one of the students.
"Excellent, five points!" Hatcher said.
The class of seventh- and eighth-graders divided into pairs and went to the various stations around the lab, such as music and sound, light, bridges, flight technology, electronics, rocketry and space, computer graphics, transportation, meteorology and simple machines. These may seem like complex subjects for the seventh- and eighth-graders, but the industrial technology lab enables them to learn the concepts at their own speed.
These industrial technology labs are now part of the middle-school curriculum across the county, except in Key, Frost and Hughes middle schools. Lee District School Board member Christian Braunlich is seeking to change that. In early February, Braunlich sought to increase the budget by $527,723 to include middle-school industrial technology labs at those three middle schools.
Braunlich looked at it as a measure of fairness.
"It's a part of what we offer, this is now a part of the baseline education. It is not appropriate to leave these three out of it," he said.
Proposing the increase is just one step and a way from actually starting construction. Braunlich felt it was important to bring forth this issue with these schools to the Board.
"Folks here are in favor of it," he said but admitted, "It may get axed again."
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<bt>Back in Hatcher's class, the word "clembo" was being thrown around during the lecture. Student assistant John Snow, 13, was getting accustomed to clembo, which was Hatcher's word for clicking the mouse. Snow took the class last year as a seventh-grader.
"That's the word he uses a lot. You learn how things work and how to build things if you have a certain thing you want to grow up and be," Snow said.
The students were drawing a simple face.
"When I was a kid, I had to draw the ellipse manually," Hatcher said.
Hatcher, a teacher of 30 years, liked being on the edge of technology.
"It's like having everything you always needed to teach," he said.
He also noted a possible role for corporations in the classroom that would fit with the budget by supplying the materials and hardware as a way to advertise. If the students were used to using a particular digital camera or computer, they might carry that familiarity into the workplace.
"We just replaced our digital camera with a new digital camera," he said.
Julie Brannon has a daughter in eighth grade at Washington Irving Middle School. Her daughter has not taken a class that utilizes the lab, but she sees it as a fairness issue as well.
"If one school has it than they all should have it," she said.
The lack of these labs isn't limited to one area of the county, though. Francis Scott Key Middle School is in Lee District, Robert Frost is in the Braddock District, and Langston Hughes is in Reston, near South Lakes High School.