High School Dropout is Now a Teacher
Aaron Eick
As a high school dropout himself, Aaron Eick has some definite ideas on what it takes to keep young people interested and engaged in classwork.
Eick, who majored in secondary education with a concentration in social studies, graduated from UWM’s School of Education this month with a 3.8 average on a 4.0 scale. He’s currently finishing his student teaching at Racine Horlick High School, plans to become a high school teacher and has promised himself he’ll go on for his master’s degree.
His career goal is to improve schools and school systems to encourage disaffected young people like himself to stay in school to complete their education. In high school, he recalls, “I thought it was all a lot of busywork, disconnected from real life.” So Eick, now 26, dropped out of Racine Case High School, devastating his mother, Lillie, a long-time teacher.
While working as a busboy at a Radisson Hotel in Lexington, Ky., Eick began to reconsider the value of an education. “I was being turned down for many of the jobs I was interested in because I didn’t have a high school diploma. I decided to get my GED (General Educational Development certificate) and just kept going to where I am today.”
Over the following six years, he moved back to Wisconsin, took courses at MATC, then moved to UWM for his teaching degree. He chose UWM because he liked the practical, down-to-earth approach to education, Eick says. Achieving that 3.8 average is an accomplishment he’s proud of. “It was a lot of work to get there,” he says simply.
Reflecting on his own experiences, Eick feels the way to keep students in school is to offer enough flexibility so students can see connections between class work and their own lives and interests. For example, he says, if an indifferent student in a history class has a passion for basketball, the student might be motivated if he or she could do a research paper on the history of the game.
Even as a student teacher, he recognizes that there are factors outside the classroom that impact a teacher’s ability to keep students engaged and motivated. In fact, that’s one reason he chose his area of concentration. He felt social studies and history offer students and teachers valuable insights into how the political climate and educational systems impact the lives of individual students, and how schools can be improved. “I had a lot of issues with the system. Now I’m interested in how the system can be changed.”
His family has been supportive of his efforts, and his mother, the teacher, is “very happy” that he’s graduated from college and is following in her footsteps, says Eick. And, now that he’s on an educational roll, he says, “there’s no doubt in my mind that I will not be stopping at a bachelor’s degree.”
URL: http://www.uwm.edu/News/Features/06.05/Aaron_Eick.html
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