Letters from Lisa

Small Cruise Ship Sinks Off Antarctica

Luckily, no one was seriously injured or killed, and it sounds like sort of a freak accident. On the other hand, you wonder - is the spirit of Shackleton cursed?

I have a lot of different job descriptions - learning specialist, curriculum coordinator, musical theater director, adjunct professor - but the one that I really prize is science teacher. I don’t think there’s ever been a better time on Earth to be a science teacher than right now. You don’t have to have a fancy lab or a class full of Einsteins and Hawkings to do some really exciting things. All you need is an Internet hookup and a blank wall.

We have been studying the solar system with the 3rd graders, and now that we’ve talked about the Earth and Moon and stars, it’s become time for the return of my very favorite teaching website, Planet 10. This site allows you, individually or as a class, to design your own planet and launch it into the existing solar system. Aside from the option to put “aliens” on the planet, which results in silly Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references during the game, it’s fairly scientific. You have to pay attention to your planet’s tilt, gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, position in reference to the Sun, and orbital path. Yet the interface is so visual and simple that with some minor guidance from an adult, 3rd graders can do it.

Kids sure are funny creatures. You give them the choice to create an entire world, and they decide to call it Planet Bob. Despite its unromantic name, Planet Bob was a winner. It approximated the conditions of Earth so closely that it remained habitable throughout the simulation. It’s the first time that I’ve done this with a group of kids and we’ve won the game. It did take many tries to get there, and one of the early obstacles was the kids’ love of the dramatic. One of our earlier attempts was called Planet Nailclipper. Unfortunately, we put Nailclipper all the way in the back of the solar system, near Pluto, so it froze over in short order. The kids were also piqued by the thought of creating a planet with a highly explosive atmosphere and placing it close to the Sun. That one was christened Fireball. Needless to say, Fireball’s existence was nasty, brutish and short.

We’ve used many great websites and free software downloads during our study of space, but this one takes first prize because kids not only enjoy it during class, but demand the URL so that they can go home and try it themselves. Even kids who aren’t studying space want to try it. During one of my classes, an older kid stuck his head in the door to see what we were doing and then said, “Why can’t WE do that? I want to try that!” Later, the 4th graders came down for class and saw it running on my computer. “Oh yeah, I remember doing that last year! What was that website again? Can you write it down for me? I want to make more planets.”

Of course, I put in a lot of effort to get us to the point where we’re casually discussing tilts, orbits, rotations, gravitational pull and atmosphere. When kids are prepared for an experience, they can go much deeper. I wouldn’t use Planet 10 to TEACH kids what an atmosphere is. We did a series of activities about air, looked at diagrams, watched a video of a space shuttle blasting through the layers of the atmosphere and eventually leaving Earth, and did a simulation with M&Ms representing air molecules and a small plastic bag representing the Earth. (Naturally, one group neglected to close their bag, and so some of their air molecules escaped into space…) But now I’m satisfied that we have enough background knowledge to really enjoy the challenge of creating habitable - or unhabitable - planets. It’s an exciting, manageable challenge. I know I played Planet 10 incessantly until I got my first win!

So that’s the internet hookup - now for the blank wall.

The other thing I’ve been working on is a new bulletin board. As a classroom teacher, I never liked bulletin boards. For one thing, there was a lot of anxiety on the part of the adults about showing kids’ work. Do we correct spellings? Are we setting up competition between kids or classrooms? Do we put up work that is excellent, but not particularly visual? Do the kids even care? Science bulletin boards are a lot easier for me to conceptualize because we are usually investigating a focused topic. Last year my boards were a mix of kids’ drawings, photographs of experiments in progress, and charts or diagrams having to do with concepts. When the kids created planets on Planet 10, those went up on the boards for a while.

I think I’ve figured out a different way to do things - one that is less of “let’s show off our finished work” and more of “let’s work on some things together”. Just the other day, a girl came in with a question about gravity that easily could have taken the whole period. She wanted to know why you can hang from a roller coaster upside down and not have gravity pull you down, and also if it would be different if you lived at the “bottom” of the world. She was having trouble articulating her question, and the other kids were getting impatient, and so we eventually shelved it for the time being. I wasn’t happy with that, for several reasons. First, she was clearly committed to getting her question answered, and I didn’t want to discourage her. Second, the other kids were spouting off answers that were basically correct, but I wasn’t confident that they understood her question or really could explain the answers well. You can say “It’s because of gravity” without really even knowing what gravity is.

And even more importantly, there are some kids in that class that I’ve known for a long time, and I can’t remember them EVER asking a single question. They constantly want to prove how smart they are and how much they know. For them, asking a question would be like admitting that they don’t know anything. I want them to see asking questions as an intellectual pursuit, not an admission of ignorance. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing science. You’re doing religion.

So I ripped down our old bulletin board (which was a game in which you had to look at microscopic and satellite photos and guess what the items were) and put up a sign that said The Great Wall of Questions. Then I spent 45 minutes with the girl who had the gravity questions, and we finally hammered out what she wanted to ask and how she wanted to phrase things. She drew two diagrams to go with her questions, and we posted them up on the board. One of the final questions was, “If you fall off a roller coaster in Antarctica, would you fall off the Earth?”

This, to me, is an awesome question. I wouldn’t have ever thought to ask it myself. But it really tests your knowledge of gravity when you think about it. And if you’re a teacher like me, it’s like peering through a window into a child’s brain to see how kids think.

First of all, a lot of kids think of the Earth as being like a container, with a top and a bottom. The air you breathe is at the top, you are in the middle, and the ground is on the bottom. If you start out in the air, you fall to the ground. Air is up (North) and ground is down (South). Now if you look at a map or a globe, at least one produced here in North America, it looks like Antarctica and Australia are on the bottom. Now maps are flat, so you show kids a globe, and they all notice that the Southern Hemisphere sticks out the bottom. Therefore, it looks like air and ground would be the reverse. Ground is up and air is down. When kids picture it, they picture something like people in Australia walking on the ceiling. This is great, except that the mental model gets over-applied. If you try to walk on your ceiling, you fall down. So it seems entirely possible to kids that people in Australia or elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere might fall off the ground and into the air.

This is where gravity comes in. The kids I work with all understand that gravity pulls you toward the ground, so they intellectually know that people in Australia can’t fall OFF the ground and into the air. But the roller coaster hints at something interesting - a belief that maybe if you are kind of in the air to begin with, and maybe if you’re going fast enough, you’ll end up falling down. Where is down? Is it the ground? Or is it the concrete perception of down, which in the roller coaster example would be - off the Earth?

So even if a kid can spout off about gravity keeping us from floating away off the Earth, that kid can still be picturing people in Australia walking on the ceiling, or people in Antarctica flying off a roller coaster straight “down” into space. And indeed, the next morning, two middle school kids stopped me on the stairwell to ask me if you would fall off the roller coaster in Antarctica into space. I asked, “What do you think?” and they hesitated before replying that “maybe” you could fly off into space. Middle school kids!

We’re going to try to fill up that Great Wall of Questions. I’d be thrilled if I got stopped on the stairwell more often. And I want kids to ask the questions that tell me what and how they’re thinking.

No, I didn’t get into a fight with someone - it’s the title of one of the songs for the musical this year.

This year’s musical is shaping up in an interesting way. I put out an open call for show ideas and got suggestions in dribs and drabs. Immediately nixed any hope of “Grease”, “High School Musical” (shudder) or a musical rendition of Pokemon (double shudder). One kid suggested a sequel to the Hank Zipzer adaptation we did two years ago. Another suggested the Chronicles of Narnia. My personal feeling on that one was - if you are going to have a talking lion in a musical, you’re pretty much doing the Wizard of Oz. Which is on my blacklist, along with The Sound of Music, so no go.

Eventually, ideas trickled down from various age groups all centering around the theme of adapting fairy tales. (Yes, these kids have all seen Shrek and its sequel spawn - why do you ask?) That, with no more details to be had, was the show that I pitched to the elementary school crowd on club choosing day, and based on that alone I got 25 takers, plus another 5 in set design. It didn’t quite approach last year’s numbers (38 onstage) but then again, last year’s show was about a computer game. I fully intended to enjoy my smaller numbers and we moved right along into choosing the fairy tales to adapt, brainstorming what nasty horrible things to do to the stories once we got a hold of them, and then casting.

I decided to use the long bus ride to the pumpkin farm to pick kids’ brains about the script. I rode with the 3rd graders and there were a number of them signed up for the show, so I figured I would ask them. I obviously forgot Rule #17 about communicating with children - as soon as you need to talk to a select few about something private, ten others are hanging on your every word and will have perfect memory for everything that was said. I’m half-convinced that teachers who want to pass along information to students should try whispering it to a single kid in the back row. Pretty soon I was being pelted with questions. “Are you going to do the show for everyone? Even us?” “So-and-So says he’s the main character, is that true?” “Is So-and-So really the Prince? Is he going to have to kiss anyone?” Eventually the conversation started to die down, but one persistent little girl wanted to know if I needed any ideas for the show. I asked if she could come up with anything about our Snow White section, which I was struggling with. She launched into a lilting melody about how Snow White and the dwarves went walking through forest, and how one by one the dwarves are picked off by different dangers - a deep hole, a large snake, several snakes, five hundred snakes - well, you get the picture.

I told her I was going to use her idea, but I don’t think she believed me. And then I went ahead and did it. I changed it a bit, obviously - first off, only ONE dwarf gets eaten by a snake. I mean, let’s not go overboard. Anyway, I made sure that everyone whom I spoke with about the show knew that the Snow White song was this girl’s idea and that I was going to give her a writing credit in the playbill. But this wasn’t enough for her. She had now decided that she wanted to BE one of the dwarves, though - shocker! - not the one that gets eaten by the snake. We went on another field trip on Wednesday, and most of the bus ride going there was taken up with “Can I be in the show, Lisa?”

And then, of course - still adhering to Rule #17 - other kids overheard, and suddenly I had a whole group of them asking to join the play.

Normally I would have said no. One of the cardinal rules of musical theater is that it has to be your first choice from the beginning. Once it gets started, you can’t leave early - or join late. But this was an unusual situation in that I had basically one of the co-authors of the show asking for an onstage role, and I was inclined to give it to her. And then, since I was letting one person join late, it wouldn’t really be fair if I didn’t let the other kids join late too. I tried to warn them that the script was basically finished and we’d have to add them in, and that all the good roles were already taken. I told them that they had to go back to school after the trip and think about it, and make sure that was what they really wanted, and only then would we make it official. One reconsidered, but the other five were firm. (The one who reconsidered later re-reconsidered. She’s now a dwarf. Still not the one who gets it from the snake, though!)

THEN, to add the final straw, the same little troublemaker talked the show up on the school bus next morning and convinced yet another child to join - one of the 4th grade boys whom I NEVER would have guessed would EVER willingly participate in the show. Maybe she should just do my club commercial next year?

So now I’m up to 32 onstage and 6 backstage. We’re about back up to last year’s numbers. It’s going to take a miracle to keep the show down to 45 minutes once we’re done granting everyone’s requests for more lines and more to do. That was a major problem last year, giving everyone enough lines to make them happy. I even resorted to “Guys, this is NOT Lord of the Rings, we can’t have a 3 hour show!” Which - I’d better be careful or someone’s going to angle for LOTR for NEXT year’s production.

In case you’re wondering, “Take That!” is the first song in the show. It’s… about a food fight.

Yeah, this one’s going to be interesting.

I posted a countdown to my Antarctica trip on the side of my computer monitor - just a screenshot from Google Earth of the Antarctic continent and the sentence, “Lisa is going to Antarctica in ____ days.” (39 as of today, by the way.) I am not above a little shameless self-trip-promotion. It’s part of the fun. I’m not talking the trip up or devoting instructional time to it - I’m just floating it out there so that it can start to generate interest and questions among the kids.

One of my strong beliefs about education is that teachers have to be well rounded people. Kids automatically assume that we sleep at school and spend our free time reciting the times tables to each other while diagramming sentences and concocting new and ever more diabolical homework assignments to torture kids. (To be fair, most children’s books and media do nothing to discourage this perception.) Now I’ve certainly given my share of diabolical homework and I do spend a lot of time planning and thinking about education, but there’s a lot more to my life than school life. And I think it’s important for kids to see that.

“How do you know so much about this stuff?” I’m asked this question by kids all the time. My response: “I read books about it.” My bookshelf has its fair share of “How To Teach Reading To Struggling Learners” and that sort of text, but those books share space with “Guns, Germs and Steel” and ”Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy”. I also seek out information firsthand, by traveling whenever I can. The kids know that when they are at camp or their country house, I am off somewhere too. Antarctica is different in that I am taking the trip during the school year. It’s one of the few destinations in the world that don’t lend themselves to a teacher’s summer vacation.

“Why are you going?” kids are asking me. “Because I want to see it,” I answer. They nod, but seem skeptical. You mean you’re going all the way down to another continent, on three airplanes and a ship, just to see it? Exactly the point. There’s value in seeing things with your own eyes, not just listening to what someone else tells you. On the other hand, you won’t understand what you’re seeing unless you have the context of what others have seen and thought about it. The days of explorers are over, but to me this is still exploration. Just because others have gone before doesn’t eliminate the possibilities for you. Kids need to know this too. Sometimes, in our attempt to help them understand, we present information to them like it is an absolute certainty, all figured out, as though there aren’t still questions to be answered and avenues to explore. It’s why I love to teach about space. Kids ask me questions all the time that there are no answers for. I love to say, “Maybe one of you will figure that out.”

One final, amusing note is that kids wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being “sent” to Antarctica because I had done something wrong. I had to reassure a few that I was going because I wanted to.

I won’t deny it - I enjoy surprising people. I can do that in a limited number of ways (less limited if you include children under the age of 12 - they’re relatively easy to surprise) and one of the surefire ways is to travel someplace wild. My trip to Australia, in which I camped out on the Great Barrier Reef and dove for sea turtles off the side of a small boat, was the first of Lisa’s Crazy Trips ™. The second was my Costa Rica-Peru-Ecuador extravaganza of 2006, which was 6 weeks long, involved two separate rainforests and Machu Picchu AND the Galapagos Islands all in one go. By the end, I was exhausted and sick, but had over 700 photos to share and lots of stories. How to top such a trip?

This past summer’s mini-stroll through Spain certainly didn’t do it. And to be fair, I didn’t want it to. I thought that I’d had enough of crazy outdoor traveling for a while and that I wanted a leisurely saunter through Europe. I thought I would want to relax, have coffee in cafes, take some photographs of pretty buildings, hit a museum, and wear skirts and sandals. And I was right - for about the first two days. After that, I started to get restless. I wasn’t DOING anything other than jostling for places on line at tourist attractions, eating, and spending money on silly things like wooden painted fans. Frankly, I felt unchallenged. Aside from one wacky day in Morocco, I didn’t do anything that would remotely surprise anyone. I spent way too much time deciding what tapas to order and how to wear my hair, and not nearly enough time taking in unusual and exciting experiences that would make traveling truly worthwhile.

When I got home from Spain, I was so underwhelmed with the whole experience that I declared I would not travel again for 365 days. I wanted to focus on work. I was starting off the school year both at my regular job and at the graduate school where I am an adjunct. I thought perhaps I’d forget about traveling for a while and focus on life at home. Again, I was wrong.

What changed my mind? Oddly enough, the impetus to travel again came from sharing my trip experiences. About two weeks ago, I gave a presentation to my students about my Australia trip (the turtle jumping). The morning started off completely crazy - I had a PowerPoint presentation, but the laptop and screen weren’t hooked up, so I had to entertain 60 young kids in the auditorium for about 20 minutes until we got the technology working. The fact that no one got hurt or started to cry (including myself) was pretty miraculous. Once we got the equipment functional, I showed them my photos and videos from the Great Barrier Reef. Every time I looked out into the audience and saw the looks on the kids’ faces, I got a chance to experience those moments through fresh eyes. I started to get excited about that trip all over again. I’ve long considered that trip one of my top life experiences. And I thought, “I haven’t felt this for a while…”

So I went home that weekend and started looking up voyages. I knew I wanted nature, and I knew I wanted sooner rather than later. I also knew that settling for a “nice” trip was not going to cut it. I had just done a trip that was just “nice” and experienced firsthand how unsatisfying that was. I wanted something just as dramatic and wild as Australia had been. And that is where Antarctica comes in.

to be continued…

Where have I been? Come walk with me –

-through the vibrant markets of old Morocco, where women in pom-pom Berber hats still offer baskets of green and purple figs on the side of the street, interspersed with hanging bags of Pampers and bestsellers reprinted in French and Arabic. Our tour guide rushes ahead to the next shop where we can buy “the best” rugs and cheap jewelry probably made in China, his partner at the end of our blatant tourist conga line shooing us away from interacting too much with anyone or wandering off down the labyrinth of sidestreets. Later, we pack ourselves back onto the tour bus - large, sparkling, out of place among the dusty cars that spend their whole lives out in the Moroccan countryside, instead of just one hectic day.

-through the gloomy medieval palaces of southern Spain, snapping endless photos of intricate columns and tiles whispering Arabic prayers, doll-faced Marys with rhinestone skirts holding red cheeked babies, and then back out to the street into the bright blue light for an afternoon coffee and tapas.

-through the newly carpeted hallways of my school, shrouded in plastic and littered with half empty cardboard boxes. Cabinets are flung open to reveal spelling workbooks and rolled up maps and brand new composition notebooks. It’s quiet now, and we are waiting. 

-as the new 6th graders burst into the science room in the mornings, greeting us dramatically, showing off new iPods and groaning about new rites of passage like history tests and gym uniforms. The younger ones pop in too, bewildered to see the “older kids” in an elementary classroom, and sneak over behind my desk to coo at my tortoise and examine the figurines and pictures scattered around my work area. I put my headphones on in an attempt to get some work done, and shoo them all upstairs.

-through the pumpkin patch, surrounded by kids in their jackets against the new fall cold, exuberantly shouting. “Look, I’ve found one!” “This one’s bumpy!” “Can you take it off the vine, Lisa?” We get to a patch of vines on the ground with pumpkin-shaped berries, and the kids exclaim their surprise when I admit that I don’t know exactly what it is. “But you know how to find out, and that’s the important thing!” They laugh and run off to fill their blue plastic bags with gourds, and I pull out my camera again…

-and later, back on the bumpy bus ride back to school, I ride in the back perched on a giant pumpkin wedged into the aisle, periodically scolding the two boys next to me to stop play fighting before someone gets hurt and finally resorting to squeezing in between them so that they can’t reach each other. I expect grumbling about how unfair it all is and how the bus ride is far too long, as well as the usual abrasive comments that show that we are above all this babyish school stuff and far too cool for teachers. Instead we chat and we giggle and before long one is calmly gazing out the window lost in daydreams, and the other is leaning on me contentedly.

Up next: How to plan a trip to Antarctica at the very last minute.