Success Stories

By Howard Heydt

In 1989, after forty-three years experience, a small start-up company I had been working for closed its doors and I found myself unemployed. This, and the death of my wife around the same time, caused me to think seriously about my future. I wanted to continue to be creative, to work, and to make use of my experience. I wanted to give something back to society and to work with young students. That's when I decided the time was right to become a volunteer.

With the help of a friend, I made contact with a 6^th grade teacher in a neighborhood elementary school. She was delighted to have me work one-on-one with her class, challenging students of all abilities, in mathematics with the aid of a computer. For ten years now, four to eight hours a week, I've continued to work with the students.

During the same time, I became aware of ReSET, a group of retired scientists and engineers doing volunteer teaching in the Washington, DC area. ReSET aides volunteers in coordinating meetings between interested teachers and volunteers. After getting acquainted, both volunteer and teacher decide what the general scope of the science material will be. Although ReSET does not provide training, they do document experiments and demonstrations that other volunteers have found to work successfully, which are available for review by a new volunteer. I've signed on with ReSET and for ten years have brought science, on a weekly basis, to classroom in two different schools - one in the inner city, and the other in a neighborhood of families new to America.

There has been a double reward for me as a volunteer. First, the students are being motivated and finding a new excitement about learning. Second, as I work with 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grades, I'm challenged as well, developing experiments and demonstrations which are at the students level and which bring them into the action from a wide range of topics including: Electricity, Magnetism, Mechanics, Optics, Color, Sound, and Communication. Something good must be happening, as teachers and students have always welcomed me back.

A few tips for new volunteers:

To keep student from being bored don't lecture. Doing lots of demonstrations and experiments will keep students actively participating. This is what requires lots of preparation, but what I consider to be the creative and challenging part.

Enthusiasm and sincere interest is also very important when teaching. It encourages students to participate openly and feel comfortable.

Students causing havoc is a very rare occasion and has only occurred for me in the inner city school and only occasionally. We require that the teacher be present during the volunteer session, and the teacher takes care of the difficult student. In an extreme case (once in my ten years) I have told the students I am leaving and will return the next week.