Google yourself! Or not.

Have you ever googled yourself? You know, just to see what comes up?

Well, since I have been teaching STEM over the last year, our program gets a little recognition from time to time. Rightly so, as the kids do some awesome stuff throughout the year. On one occasion in particular, our kids participated in a spelling bee at our school versus the school on the “other” side of the highway, and I, along with the other teachers in our program, was named.

Yesterday as I put my lesson planning aside, I decided to google myself. I was surprised to see a write up in the paper in regards to the training I just returned from in Tyler. My name was there, along with the other folks that will be teaching this new class across our district.

I don’t teach because I want to be famous. I teach because I seriously love what I do. But, it is cool to see your name in print.

So, I forwarded the article to my parents. They usually like to know what I am up to, especially since they live many states away.

My mom sent me an article back—it was an editorial that was written to that same local paper about how our district is rushing into STEM programs.

You could tell that this guy really didn’t know much about our district. All he knew was that our superintendents’ wife is in charge of the STEM programs.

He doesn’t know that this “woman” is absolutely brilliant. I got to work with her firsthand this year. She has her Ph.D. and has experience as a teacher and a professor. She would push us as her teachers, and in turn, we pushed our kids. She provided us with the tools and the resources and we were able to produce some amazing results. (As a matter of fact, in the four fifth grade classes at both schools—100% of our kids passed the math, the reading and the science TAKS test!)

That wasn’t in the guy’s opinion piece. He also didn't know that our district has been doing STEM "stuff" for at least four years.

I guess the moral of the story is, when you google yourself, you need to be prepared. You might find something nice, or you might find something that is not true.

Darn you internet.