Melissa Pore
Engineering, cybersecurity and technology
Bishop O’Connell High School, Arlington
Years teaching: 23
● “Coming from Texas, I had dreams of becoming an astronaut and a pilot. But as a girl I didn’t have STEM as a road map. I try to provide those links for every student so they know they can do anything they want.”
● “You lead by learning and you learn by leading. I push myself to learn new technologies so I can teach my students.”
● “We build and launch satellites. The most recent was called ‘Space Toast’ because it was about the size and shape of a piece of bread. We had teams of mission managers, hardware specialists, coders, high-altitude balloon testers. They did it all—build, code, test and launch. The bread was ‘toasted’ during thermal-vac testing and became ‘burnt toast’ after an extreme low-earth orbit of about six days.”
● “I try to teach [students] to empower themselves. Don’t be afraid to collaborate and bring people in when you don’t know an answer.”
● “Passion is powerful and engaging. You can’t let hurdles like paperwork deter you from the goal of inspiring a student and being there every day. You teach through your behavior, grace, confidence and stamina.”
● “Kids today manage information differently. They are digital natives. As an engineering design teacher, I want them to sketch, draw, use a ruler. They are much better at using their phone, and that’s OK, too. It’s good for them to think in their own tools. That’s part of owning and feeling confident about a problem.”
● “It’s about real-world examples. I’ll have an amateur radio day where we do demos during lunch. I’ll have a coding day and we get these integrated circuit boards and I show them how to transfer different kinds of Python and Java programming. We do soldering, drilling and woodworking. They made these really cool houses with 3-D printing, electricity and copper. The goal is that they leave [my class] with an engineering design project they are proud of.”
● “I can’t help them with what’s happening in the outside world, but I can change what happens in my classroom. I want it to be great and exciting. Life is hard. But you can love learning.”
–Matt Blitz