Redding School District

Partnership Educators,

Adam left his latest gig in downtown San Francisco as he did every night staring out the cab window.  He was the son of wealthy parents who were convinced that he wouldn’t amount to anything more than a ditch digger.   He hadn’t been a good student in school.  Bored and inattentive towards most of his studies in high school.  He earned an A and six F’s one semester.   After barely managing to graduate high school, he did study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for less than a year but he dropped out.    He was scraping by while playing his bass with his endless no-name bands every night.

Adam was always fascinated with the night sky and on this particular night, he noticed something that he hadn’t before.   Across the bay lay a constellation that he often fixed on and this night he noticed that it was different.    Stopping and starring more intently, he was convinced that the Orion Constellation moved and was most certainly in another location.    This fascination prompted him to take an astronomy class at the College of Marin, but he was required to complete a class in physics first.  This was, as they say, the beginning and the end for Adam.

Adam Steltzner is currently employed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he was the Chief Engineer on the Mars Crane Landing System for the Curiosity Rover that landed on Mars in 2012.  He is also the chief engineer and design team leader on the 2020 project to bring back pieces of Mars to Earth. 

Adam Steltzner, the low performing high school student, graduated from the University of California Davis with a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering; a Master’s in Applied Mechanics at California Institute of Technology; a PhD in Engineering Mechanics from University of Wisconsin-Madison; 2016 Inductee into the National Academy of Engineering; and the Chief Engineer at NASA and all because he was curious about the Orion Constellation and its movement one night. 

Education is about access to the future.  The future is hard for us to define.  Adam would say it starts with curiosity.  The annual World Economic Summit consistently reports that creativity is going to be one of the most in-demand skills.  Large companies often list things like flexibility, handling ambiguity, tenacity, a passion for learning, and maintaining composure to name a few.  The skills of the past might have just listed reading, writing, and math as the main skills.  Those are still important but it is more about what people are able to do with those skills that matters the most. 

I am proud of our efforts to look past basic content instruction and work hard to develop the necessary future skills that our students will most certainly need.  We aren’t just teaching coding in our schools.  We are teaching creativity, tenacity and a passion to learn.  We aren’t just exposing kids to music.  We are helping students to be flexible, maintain composure and work hard with a team.    We aren't just teaching reading.  We are building curiosity and long term learning.  Thanks to all of you who work with our students in one capacity or another and help them to learn that they can make a difference in their own life and everyone around them.  Adam says, “The right kind of risk can make a difference.  Great works and great folly may be indistinguishable at the onset.  It should be about letting great ideas win, not people.  It’s about finding what’s right, not being right.” 

Have a great weekend,

Rob