•July 15, 2015•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I have long lamented that I don’t know how things work—electricity, telephone, computers, Internet. Guess I was never stimulated into such discoveries by my science teacher, who himself probably didn’t know how things worked.
This past week, however, I visited a path-breaking new public elementary school that is all about learning how things work. I had been told about the place by an impressed educator friend who said, “Nowlan, you gotta see this place.”
The John Dunham STEM Partnership School is located on the campus of Aurora University, in the rustbelt city of same name on the western edge of Chicagoland. For 200 3rd to 8th graders from surrounding, often gritty public schools, the school is devoted full-time to exciting youngsters about science, technology, engineering and math.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.