Electric Dreams: One Unlikely Team of Kids and the Race to Build the Car of the Future Electric Dreams, an account of a group of high school kids from a remote part of North Carolina who work together to build an electric car, should leave you feeling inspired.
The writing style matches the story – it simple and fast-paced. I suppose that comes from the author’s background as a reporter. Caroline Kettlewell doesn’t let anything get in the way of the facts, because they alone are more than enough to drive you on to the next page.
I have been to this part of North Carolina. It is a place with lots of wide open spaces, plenty of timber, and peanut farms. Plenty of birds migrate through here each year. It is a place where you can find a lot of old Ford Escorts and Chevy S-10s. It is definitely a place where the expression of the phrase “number 10″ is followed quickly by the thought of “Ricky Rudd.” It has 13 percent college graduates, the median household income is about ,000, and more than 80 percent of the kids are on free and reduced lunch.
Unfortunately, these are some coincidental forces that conspire to make it seem like this is not a place where you would expect to find path breaking innovations in engineering. It is not a place where your average Berkeley-educated young person can move into town and expect a welcome. All of those elements are present in Kettlewell’s story. To find out that this really happened here is to be refreshed.
This is a story that might be interesting to anyone concerned about small towns or about eastern North Carolina. It is also one more example of how well the Teach for America program is working across our country. More broadly, its a great piece of non-fiction. This really happened. Find out about it. : When Berkeley graduate Eric Ryan was sent by Teach for America to a hardscrabble high school in the heart of North Carolina’s NASCAR country, he didn’t count on Harold Miller – a big guy with a big laugh and a tarheel accent as thick as sorghum syrup – sticking his head into his class one morning and announcing, “Hey Mr. Ryan, we’re gonna build an electric car.” Two regional utilities had challenged a group of elite schools throughout the South to design and build battery-powered electric vehicles to be judged during a final contest at NASCAR’s Richmond International Raceway. Although Ryan’s underprivileged high school was not on the list, Miller managed to squeak them in. With a Ford Escort rescued from the compacter, a few hundred pounds of scavenged golf cart batteries, a local minor league NASCAR driver as coach, and the local constabulary looking the other way as the reborn “Shocker” began careening over back roads on test runs, the kids get their pasted-together dark horse to the big contest in Richmond. Electric Dreams offers drama built on marvelous small-town characters, and a story of never-say-die invention which would make North Carolina’s other pioneers, the Wright Brothers, proud.
Electric Dreams: One Unlikely Team of Kids and the Race to Build the Car of the Future
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Tags: Dreams, Electric, Future, Unlikely