By Michael Hill
Correspondent
“I was trying to hide my face,” said Tracy Espiritu.
It’s still hard for Espiritu to believe it. She was one of 40 teachers in America receiving a Milken Educator Award and a check for $25,000.
“It still hasn’t really dawned on me,” she said.
But her love of teaching has — after leaving the private sector as a product engineer.
“I feel like I found my niche,” she said.
At Dr. Albert Einstein Academy in Elizabeth — grades K through 8 — teaching students and training other teachers in engineering as America struggles to stay competitive globally in “STEAM: science, technology, engineering, architecture and math.”
“Education needs just to allow the time for those students to have those hands-on experience, have those competitions, to allow them to revise their thinking when it’s wrong the first time,” Espiritu said.
Espiritu says it’s about inspiring young minds and making them become critical thinkers as in this project they’re working on now which is to make an intersection safer.
These fourth-graders worked in teams to take on the challenge. Espiritu teaches them to think like engineers and solve everyday problems.
They must decide which works better — a traffic light or stop signs.
The class takes one group’s design to test and act out.
“The students love it. They don’t realize that they’re learning something. They think that they’re playing. They think that, the challenge allows them to be more engaged in what they’re doing,” Espiritu said.
Espiritu still wants to be an astronaut. She says as a teacher she’s closer to NASA now than in the private sector.
Thanks to her, Einstein is a NASA explorer school with visits to both the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers and a direct classroom link to Mission Control.
Einstein Academy has a trophy case full of awards from competitions all over America. Much of the credit goes to Espiritu for inspiring her students, their parents and the district.
“It provides a development of certain skills that you can’t always include in the classroom,” Espirtu said.
In the classrooms of her grammar and high schools, Espiritu says science and engineering were absent, so in college she had to play catchup.
“Well, it feels like I’m a late bloomer. I love science. I love teaching science. I love when the students discover something. So, I’m almost like re-living it through them,” she said.
That’s what propels Espiritu to teach and her principal and the district to nominate her for the Milken Educator Award.
“I was surprised and then I said it makes absolute sense,” said Prin Mellody.
“Good teachers could come from anywhere,” Espiritu said.
This one comes from Rutgers with a masters degree in engineering and a challenge to her students to succeed in whatever they choose to do. After all, she has.