Success Stories from 1999

Each year the Techmobile Instructor identifies students and sites that have taken full advantage of the mobile computer lab and highlights the gains in these short summaries.

Small Programs, Big Results

Though a small program, Glendive has some wonderful teachers and students. The majority of the students live in Montana year round, but their parents travel from county to county in search of farm work. However, there were a couple of students from Texas whose parents had come to hoe in the beet fields. In particular, a boy named Isaac stood out. He is a very intelligent ten-year-old who just seemed to want a little bit of attention, and with the small size of the program (only six students at the Glendive school), he was able to get it. His family is from Crystal City in Texas, and his parents and aunts and uncles were all in Montana for a few weeks. I had the opportunity to meet his mother who was very interested in the ten computers in the Techmobile and in what it could do. She has a college education, but she cannot find any work in southern Texas. She and her family have to live in a house with peeling paint, a leaky roof and broken steps.

Isaac, like most other students, had used computers in school, but he had never had as much exposure as his time in the Techmobile. He particularly enjoyed a program called Math for the Real World, which was a series of math story problems set in a story-line, the end of which is creating your own music video. Most of the time I think Isaac could have finished all of the problems without a lot of help from the teacher, but when I wasn't busy with someone else he had me over next to his computer talking him through the difficult problems. It was hard to leave him and Glendive after a week and a half.

Estrella

A very experienced migrant director in Montana has told me many times how much he admires the students he works with. They get up at three or four in the morning, go out into the fields and hoe sugar beets for ten or twelve hours, and then they return home only to get on the school bus and go to school. "When I was a kid," he tells me, "school was the furthest thing from my mind. The work these kids do is very impressive." The students I have worked with have been equally impressive. One standout from this summer was Gaby. Halfway through my time in Sidney, she found out her family was moving on in three days. In that amount of time we had to finish her World History, first semester project, so that she could get credit for the work she had done that whole summer. She came in early and stayed late those three days so that she could get work done. The last day she even had to stay in from the fields to finish her project. Most of those three days she worked on the Techmobile, doing research and printing tables and reports. The project was challenging, but Gaby stuck with it and finished it before her family had to leave. ESTRELLA students have some wonderful opportunities, but they can only be successful if, like Gaby, they apply themselves.

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